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| layout | title |
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| post | when oracle cut the free tier, i moved the gif picker back home |
here's a thing that happened with almost no fanfare: oracle quietly cut its "always free" cloud tier in half, and i found out the way everyone finds out: by reading a changelog and an account notice with no announcement attached.
the free vps i'd been leaning on
for a while i had one small arm instance on oracle cloud infrastructure, running the matrix gif picker at giphy.dustin.coffee. it's the "pick a gif, grab the mxc:// link, paste it into matrix" tool. the title literally says "pix's finest gif picker." i did not name it, but i respect it. it was a nice little anchor, something tiny running on someone else's hardware, close to the matrix server, no electric bill from my own rack.
the quietly halved always free
the always free ampere a1 allowance used to be four ocpu and 24 GB of ram. that's a genuinely generous amount, more than almost any cloud gives away for free. then, with no big announcement, oracle cut it to two ocpu and 12 GB. the monthly allowance dropped to 1,500 ocpu hours and 9,000 GB hours, and the new number took effect around mid-august. existing always free users got hit by it, not just new signups.
on top of that, there's the idle reclamation. oracle has been tearing down "always free" instances it decides are idling, based on cpu and memory usage. so even when you keep a box alive, you're renting from somebody who can decide it's not earning its keep and take it back.
the word "always" was doing an awful lot of work in "always free."
the obvious question
why not just add a card and switch to pay-as-you-go? because the whole point was free. the moment you drop a card on file you're in maybe-i-get-surprised-by-a-bill territory, and now it's not free, it's just unfinalized. and for the thing i was running, a gif picker, the math was embarrassing: i could run that exact service on hardware i already own for exactly zero extra dollars a month.
what i did
i moved the gif picker home. the dns for giphy.dustin.coffee now points at my own homelab, at the public edge running caddy, and the service hums along on a box i control. same tool, same mxc:// links, same tiny footprint. the oracle instance is getting decommissioned.
it's not a dramatic migration. there was no data to lose, no careful cutover, no seconds of downtime that mattered. it's a tiny service that stopped living on a free lease and moved into its own place.
the lesson
free tier clouds are a lease, not a home. oracle's is, or was, genuinely the most generous free compute anywhere, and i don't begrudge them tightening it. the economics of always-free at that scale were never going to last. but "always free" is a marketing phrase with a reaper attached. the moment you build something on a free allocation, you've signed up for somebody else's changelog.
a homelab is the opposite. no reaper, no ocpu ceiling i didn't pick, no surprise account notice at 7am. you pay the electric bill and the replacement cost of your own hardware, but you own the whole thing. the free tier is a cafe's free refill policy. the homelab is your own kitchen.
what's next
there's not much left on oracle that i care about. once the picker was home the rest of the account became dead weight, and it's not worth keeping a tenancy alive for a box that's not carrying anything. if anything else was over there, it's next out the door.
i'm not anti-cloud. i'm anti-lease for anything that doesn't need to be leased. my homelab already runs the chat, the media, the git, the build pipelines, the ai stack. an arm box with two ocpu was never going to be the thing that made or broke any of it.
thanks for reading. what's the free service you're still half-expecting to get the axe next?
-dustin