Which cloud is cheapest for a small project?
The honest answer depends on whether you mean free today or free in two years — and on one number that changed in 2026 while almost every guide on the internet kept quoting the old one.
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For a genuinely free, always-on small server, Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier is still the most generous of the majors, but it is half the size it was: Oracle cut the Arm allowance from 4 cores and 24 GB to 2 cores and 12 GB in June 2026. AWS and Azure lead with time-limited trials plus a smaller set of permanently free services. If you are learning for a job, the cheapest cloud and the right cloud are different questions.
Search for Oracle's free tier and you will be told, over and over, that you get 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of RAM on Arm. That was true and it is not any more. Oracle halved the Always Free Ampere allowance to 2 OCPUs and 12 GB, effective 15 June 2026, and began terminating instances above the new limit from 18 August 2026. There was no blog post and no customer announcement — people found out when their machines stopped. Reports indicate pay-as-you-go accounts kept the larger allowance; the cut landed on Always Free accounts. Any article still quoting the old figure was written before mid-2026 and has not been checked since. Confirm on Oracle's own page before you architect around any number, including this one.
What "cheapest" even means here
Three different questions hide inside this one, and they have different answers.
- Free forever, meaning a service that stays at zero indefinitely as long as you stay inside its limits. This is the one people actually want for a side project.
- Free for now, meaning a trial: credits or a twelve-month window, after which the meter starts. Useful for learning, dangerous for anything you intend to leave running.
- Cheapest when paying, meaning the lowest sustained bill once you are past any free allowance. A different comparison again, and usually decided by whether you can turn things off.
| Oracle Cloud | AWS | Azure | Google Cloud | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Always-free compute | Arm instances up to 2 cores and 12 GB total, plus two very small x86 micro instances | A limited set of always-free services; the general-purpose compute allowance is trial-based | A set of always-free services; compute is credit and trial based | A small always-free micro instance in limited regions |
| Trial | Credits for the first period, then Always Free continues | Credits and a twelve-month window on many services | Credit for the first month plus twelve months of selected services | Credits for the first period |
| Always-free database | Two autonomous databases, 20 GB each | Limited; mostly trial-based | Limited; small serverless tiers | Limited |
| Storage | About 200 GB of block storage total | Modest object-storage allowance | Modest object-storage allowance | Modest object-storage allowance |
| Best for | An always-on hobby server that must cost nothing | Learning the platform employers use most | Learning the platform enterprises use most | A specific service you want |
The catch behind each free tier
Every one of these has a trap, and they are not the same trap.
Oracle's is capacity and architecture. The Arm instances are genuinely capable, and they are also frequently unobtainable in popular regions — you will meet an out-of-capacity error and retry for days. The instances are Arm, so anything you run needs a build for that architecture, which is fine for most modern software and a wall for some. And, as above, the allowance itself can change under you with no notice.
The trial-based tiers' trap is the cliff. Twelve months feels like forever when you start and arrives suddenly. The classic failure is a project left running past the window, quietly billing for a year before anyone notices. If you use a trial, put a calendar reminder at eleven months and a budget alert on day one.
Everyone's shared trap is the thing next to the free thing. The virtual machine is free; the public IP address, the egress past the allowance, the load balancer, the backup, the snapshot and the managed database beside it usually are not. Most "why did my free project cost money" stories are one of those, not the compute.
The compute is free. The bill comes from the things standing next to it.
Practising without a bill
If you are learning for a job rather than hosting a hobby project, the question changes. You are not looking for a free server; you are looking for permission to make mistakes without paying for them, and that is a discipline rather than a tier. The short version: set a budget alert before you deploy anything, prefer consumption tiers that scale to zero over machines that bill while idle, put each exercise in its own resource group so one delete removes everything, and watch the four things that cause most accidental spend — public IP addresses, disks orphaned when a machine is deleted, gateways, and egress. The full routine is in practising Azure without a bill.
So who should pick what
You want a small always-on server for a personal project and it must cost nothing. Oracle's Always Free tier, with clear eyes about the reduced allowance, the Arm architecture and the capacity hunt. Two cores and 12 GB is still more free compute than anyone else hands out indefinitely.
You are learning to get hired. Use the cloud your target employers run, and use the free-practice discipline above rather than chasing the biggest free tier. A portfolio built on the platform in the job posting is worth more than a slightly cheaper one built elsewhere, and the money you save is measured in pounds while the difference in employability is measured in interviews.
You need a managed database for a side project. Oracle's two autonomous databases are the most generous permanently free option, with the caveat that they are Oracle databases rather than Postgres or MySQL, and they can be reclaimed if left idle. If you specifically want Postgres, the free tiers from the specialist hosted-database providers are usually a better fit than any of the majors' general-purpose offerings, and the small serverless database tiers on the big clouds are cheap rather than free.
Common questions
Which cloud is actually free forever?
Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier is the most generous permanently free offer among the majors, and it is smaller than most guides say: the Arm allowance was halved to 2 cores and 12 GB in June 2026, with over-limit instances terminated from that August. The other major clouds each keep a set of always-free services but lead with time-limited trials and credits for general-purpose compute.
Did Oracle change its free tier?
Yes, and quietly. The Always Free Ampere allowance dropped from 4 cores and 24 GB to 2 cores and 12 GB with effect from 15 June 2026, and Oracle began terminating instances above the new limit from 18 August 2026. There was no announcement; users discovered it when machines stopped or when the numbers on the website changed. Pay-as-you-go accounts reportedly kept the larger allowance.
Why did my free cloud project still cost money?
Almost always something standing next to the free resource rather than the resource itself: a public IP address, egress past the free allowance, a disk left behind after the machine was deleted, a gateway, a snapshot, or a managed service beside the compute. The second common cause is a trial window expiring while the project kept running.
How do I practise Azure without getting a bill?
Set a budget alert before you deploy anything, prefer consumption tiers that scale to zero over machines that bill while idle, deallocate rather than stop virtual machines, put each exercise in its own resource group and delete the whole group when you are done, and watch for public IPs, orphaned disks, gateways and egress. Practised that way, learning costs close to nothing.
Is Oracle's free tier good enough for a real project?
For a personal project, often yes — two Arm cores and 12 GB runs a great deal. For anything with users who would notice an outage, be careful: capacity in popular regions is frequently unavailable, the allowance has changed without notice, and idle resources can be reclaimed. It is an excellent free lab and a risky place for something that matters.
Do I need a credit card for a cloud free tier?
Usually yes, on all the majors, as identity verification even where nothing will be charged. That is also why a budget alert on day one matters: the card is on file, so the guard rail has to be something you set rather than something the absence of payment details provides.