Free tiers are the on-ramp to the cloud, and in 2026 two of the biggest ones changed in ways that caught a lot of small projects by surprise. AWS replaced its familiar twelve-month free tier for new accounts with a credit-based plan, and Oracle cut its famously generous Always Free compute allowance in half — without, in Oracle's case, any announcement at all. If your architecture was planned around the old limits, it may already be running on borrowed time. Here is what changed, what it means for small projects, and how to adjust.

AWS: From Twelve Months Free to Two Hundred Dollars in Credits

In July 2025, AWS replaced the twelve-month free tier for new accounts with a credit plan capped at two hundred dollars over six months. New accounts now receive one hundred dollars in credits at sign-up and can earn up to one hundred more by completing onboarding activities in services such as EC2 and Bedrock. The free plan ends after six months or when the credits run out, whichever comes first, and it cannot reach every AWS service. After that, the account closes unless you upgrade to a paid plan, with a ninety-day window to reopen it.

The practical effect is that AWS is now a six-month trial rather than a year-long runway. A small EC2 instance that used to run free for a year now draws down the credit balance from day one, and the two hundred dollars disappears faster than most people expect once storage, data transfer and a managed database join the bill. More than thirty services still keep an always-free allowance on either plan — Lambda is the notable example — but compute, the thing most beginners want, is now credit-funded. Accounts created before the cutover keep the legacy twelve-month structure, which is worth checking before you assume the new rules apply to you.

Oracle: The Most Generous Free Tier Got Cut in Half

Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier was the outlier for years: four Arm-based Ampere cores and twenty-four gigabytes of memory, with no expiry date, plus two small AMD virtual machines, two hundred gigabytes of block storage, and ten terabytes of outbound data a month. In June 2026 that changed. Oracle's documentation now lists fifteen hundred OCPU hours and nine thousand gigabyte-hours a month on the Ampere shape, which Oracle says equals two OCPUs and twelve gigabytes of memory — exactly half the previous allowance. The change arrived with no blog post and no customer notice; most people found out when an instance stopped or a support agent mentioned it.

The rest of the Always Free set is intact: the two AMD micro VMs, the two hundred gigabytes of storage, and the ten terabytes of outbound data. And even halved, Oracle's free tier remains the most generous always-free compute available from any major provider — Google Cloud's free tier offers one small e2-micro VM by comparison, and Azure's free VMs last twelve months. But anyone still following an older guide that promises four cores is planning around a machine that can no longer be created or kept, and instances running over the new limit were flagged for termination. Check your tenancy against the current documentation, not against a tutorial from last year.

What to Do About It

First, audit what you actually run for free and where it lives. If a project depends on an always-free allowance, Oracle or Google Cloud is now the only honest answer among the big four; AWS and Azure are best treated as long trials for learning and evaluation. Second, set up billing alerts on every account, even free ones — the most common free-tier horror story is not a price change but a service quietly running past its allowance, and an alert set at a few dollars catches it before it becomes a real bill. Third, keep your architecture portable: a small site in Docker Compose can move between providers in an afternoon, while a project built on one provider's managed services cannot.

Free tiers will keep changing, because they are marketing budgets dressed as infrastructure. Treat every allowance as temporary, read the provider's own free-tier page before planning around a number, and keep a cheap paid fallback — a small VPS costs a few dollars a month and never expires. The goal is not to chase free forever; it is to build something small that survives the next quiet cut.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is Oracle Cloud still free in 2026?

A: Yes, the Always Free tier continues, but the Arm compute allowance is now two OCPUs and twelve gigabytes of memory, half of what it was before June 2026.

Q: Do old AWS accounts keep the twelve-month free tier?

A: Accounts created before 15 July 2025 keep the legacy structure. New accounts get up to two hundred dollars in credits over six months instead.

Q: Which free tier is best for a small website in 2026?

A: For a server that stays free with no end date, Oracle Always Free first for capacity, Google Cloud's e2-micro second for simplicity. AWS and Azure are better seen as trials.