Yes, Oracle Cloud's always-free tier really does include a permanently free ARM instance — I run a meaningful part of my agent infrastructure on one. The catch people miss is not the price, it is the availability and the mindset. The free-tier ARM instance hosts agent services and a long-running site in my stack, and it has been genuinely useful. But I treat it as a nearly-free compute resource with a recall clause, not as a permanent home for anything I cannot afford to lose.

What the always-free tier gives you

Oracle Cloud's free tier covers a small set of always-free resources, distinct from the temporary trial credit you start with. The part that stands out for people running agents is the ARM instance: it is always-free rather than a time-boxed trial, which means you can leave a service running on it indefinitely without it expiring. For an always-on workload — an agent service that needs to answer around the clock, or a site that is expected to stay up — that long-running nature is the whole point.…