How to Get Oracle's Always Free ARM VPS (24GB RAM, 4 CPUs). Auto-Retry Script to Beat 'Out of Capacity'.
Published: January 30, 2026
Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier gives you one ARM VPS, the Ampere A1 (VM.Standard.A1.Flex) shape, with 24GB RAM, 4 CPUs and 200GB storage. Forever free. Like an EC2 or Azure VM. The only cloud provider that gives this away always free.
Banged my head for over a year on the web console. The instance is almost always out of capacity across every availability domain.
Finally asked my AI Coder (Claude Code now) to research how people actually get these instances. Answer: automated retry scripts running 24/7, cycling through availability zones. Takes 1-3 months typically.
Had it build a retry script with monitoring dashboard, deployed on my server. The script will keep retrying until a VM is created. Results are saved to json on server on success. Checks all 3 availability domains each round. Ran 30+ days, over 100K API calls. Finally got the instance. Felt like I won a lottery.
Oracle reclaims inactive free instances - so put it to work immediately. Had Claude Code secure the server, install Coolify, deploy my DuckDB dashboards as alternate backend (IMDb data, 230M rows, 16GB database, FastAPI layer) - same day.
Resources below - VPS creation tool, infra guides, live dashboard.
Bonus: Oracle also gives 2 AMD Micro VMs (E2.1.Micro) - 1 CPU, 1 GB RAM each, x86 (not ARM), always available. No lottery. Great for many tasks. Each uses ~50 GB of your 200 GB quota.
Resources
Oracle ARM VPS Creator: Real-time Web UI with Live Monitoring https://github.com/amararun/oci-arm-vm-monitor FastAPI + HTML interface with Basic Auth. All OCI credentials stay server-side.
2026 Infra Guide for Tool Builders
Live Dashboard (DuckDB, IMDb data, 230M rows, 16GB, Open Source) https://www.tigzig.com/movie-explorer Toggle between Hetzner/Oracle servers.
Working on something similar? How I work covers the rates, the availability and what I take on.