Why Oracle Cloud Is the Best Free Tier for AI Projects
For solo builders, infrastructure cost is the silent killer. You spend a weekend building something, you ship it, and a week later your AWS bill is $80. Two months in, you're spending more on hosting than you're earning, and the project quietly dies. I looked at the major free tiers when I started building. AWS gives you a tiny instance that runs out of credits before your project is done. Google Cloud's free tier is similar. Azure's the same story. They're all designed to lock you in, not actually let you build. Then I found Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier. 4 ARM CPUs. 24 GB of RAM. $0 a month. Forever. I don't fully understand why Oracle is being this generous, but every backend service I run today lives on it. What This Post Covers Why Oracle Cloud's Always Free tier is uniquely suited for AI-heavy workloads, what 24 GB of RAM actually unlocks for solo builders, the networking setup that took me an embarrassing amount of time to figure out, ...