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.)
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.