What worked for me was handing them a credit card and transitioning myself out of the free tier. (I'd use the free credits they offer prior to doing this - they give you something like $300 immediately on signup.)
The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.
I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.
Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.
Apple quietly introduced a native container runtime in macOS 26—and it doesn’t look like Docker/Podman under the hood. Instead of running all containers inside a single Linux host VM, Apple’s CLI (“container”) spins up a lightweight VM per container via Virtualization.framework. That means each container gets its own kernel, IP, ext4 block storage, and explicit CPU/memory limits. On M3+ Macs, you can even expose nested virtualization (I put a VM in your Container!) It’s OCI‑compatible (your existing Docker/Podman/Kubernetes images work), and Rosetta 2 even lets you run amd64 images on Apple Silicon.
I benchmarked Apple’s runtime (v0.5.0) against Docker/Colima on an M1 Pro (32 GB, macOS 26.0.1). I measured image pulls, cold/warm starts, lifecycle ops, parallel starts, file churn, plus stress‑ng, fio, and 7zip.
A few takeaways:
Startup: sub‑second starts as advertised; “container system start” returns instantly (no host VM spin‑up).
CPU/Memory: competitive or slightly favorable to Apple in stress‑ng and 7zip; memory tests consistently leaned Apple.
I/O: Fio (the flexible I/O tester!) flipped the story—Docker performed substantially better on randomized reads and mixed RW.
Clickthrough to the post to find exact commands, scripts, and full outputs, plus charts comparing Apple vs Docker/Colima.
My understanding is that the firmware has some sort of DRM and it’s being sold - not freely distributed. (Admittedly, the comment I saw mentioning cost pegged it at 1k, not 20k for a license.)
My experience with more traditional (non-Whisper-based) diarization & transcription is that it's heavily dependent on how well the audio is isolated. In a perfect scenario (one speaker per audio channel, well-placed mics) you'll potentially see some value from it. If you potentially have scenarios where the speaker's audio is being mixed with other sounds or music, they'll often be flagged as an additional speaker (so, speaker 1 might also be speaker 7 and 9) - which can make for a less useful summary.
The always-free infra remains free, you just have the chance of incurring a bill if you make selections that aren't free or exceed block storage/egress (200GB/10TB) limits of the always-free tier. Leaving the free/trial tier gives you access to a much larger pool of instances. I never successfully deployed an A1 instance prior to becoming a "paying" customer - now I've done it hundreds of times without ever having an issue.
I've been running a small k0s cluster and a standalone webserver for months while incurring about $2.50 - $3 in spending each month, primarily from being slow to remove instance snapshots sitting in block storage.
Even things that are oddly expensive on AWS - like NAT - are free on Oracle. There are zero gotchas.