Everyone talks about Vercel and Railway free tiers. Meanwhile Oracle Cloud quietly gives away an ARM VM with 4 OCPUs and 24 GB RAM, forever, $0 — and nobody believes it's real until they see the invoice.
I ran my actual side-project stack on it for 60 days: Postgres, a FastAPI backend, an Ollama-served 7B model (it fits in 24 GB!), and Caddy in front.
The numbers
| Metric | Oracle Always Free | My old $12/mo VPS |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | 4 × Ampere ARM cores | 2 × shared vCPU |
| RAM | 24 GB | 2 GB |
| Storage | 200 GB block | 50 GB |
| Uptime (60d) | 99.94% (one 3.5h reboot, scheduled) | 99.98% |
| Monthly bill | $0 | $12 |
The RAM is the cheat code. 24 GB means I can run Postgres and an LLM on the same box — on a 2 GB VPS I was constantly tuning swap.
The two honest gotchas
- The capacity lottery. In popular regions (Ashburn, Frankfurt), "out of capacity for VM.Standard.A1.Flex" is a daily message. I got mine in Seoul after 3 days of a retry script. Some regions never have stock.
- ARM. Anything x86-only needs emulation or won't run. My stack (Postgres, Python, Ollama) is all ARM-native — check yours first.
I wrote the retry script and the Docker Compose setup with MonkeyCode's free tier (https://ly.cyberserval.tech/iIETXiF) — it correctly warned me that platform: linux/arm64 mismatches were my biggest risk before I deployed.
If you could get a 24 GB ARM box for free forever, what's the first thing you'd self-host on it?
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