A developer who checked all the "model answer" boxes documented their experience this week: a China Merchants Bank Visa dual-currency card, Outlook email, China Telecom residential broadband, real pinyin name—the complete four-piece registration set for Oracle Cloud, all in order—only to get ABC'd (Account Blocked/Closed, i.e., outright account ban) before even a $1 pre-authorization could be charged. This is not an isolated case. Oracle's risk control in 2025 is completely different from a year ago.
What This Is
Oracle Cloud's free tier has two components: Always Free (genuinely permanently free) and a 30-day $300 trial credit. The widely circulated "4-core 24GB forever free" belongs to the ARM resources under Always Free, with 3,000 OCPU hours per month—theoretically enough to run a 4-core 24GB machine around the clock.
But "theoretically" and "in practice" are two different things. ARM resources in Asian regions are chronically out of stock; occasional releases get swept up by scripts within seconds. What you can reliably get are two tiny x86 machines with 1/8 OCPU + 1GB RAM each—running a website or a model is basically out of the question.
On the registration risk control front, the days when QQ email passed and casually filling in credit card details got instant approval in 2024 are over. The current ticket to success is: Visa/Mastercard dual-currency card (UnionPay, prepaid, and virtual cards are instantly rejected), Outlook or long-standing Gmail account (QQ email is essentially an automatic rejection), residential broadband IP (datacenter IP ranges are instantly disqualified), and a real name matching the credit card. Even with all of these in order, there's still a significant probability of getting ABC'd. A card rejected more than twice essentially enters a blacklist, which also affects its approval rate for other overseas services.
Industry View
Oracle tightening risk control is, at its core, a shift from land-grab expansion to cost control. The free tier is a classic loss-leader customer acquisition tool for cloud providers; once user scale reaches a certain threshold, tightening entry and filtering out low-value users is an inevitable move. AWS and GCP free tiers have gone through the same arc from lenient to strict.
But we note a signal worth greater concern: compliance friction for Chinese users on overseas cloud services is systematically rising. Recently, approval rates for Chinese cards across multiple overseas SaaS platforms have noticeably declined, driven by a multi-layer tightening of payment risk control and data compliance. Building a business on a foundation of freebie-hunting is inherently unsustainable.
There are dissenting voices: some developers believe Oracle is merely cracking down on abuse, and that compliant users can still get unbanned through support ticket appeals. But based on community feedback, appeal success rates are not optimistic, and the waiting period is long—unacceptable for production environments.
Impact on Regular People
For enterprise IT: do not factor free cloud resources into any production planning. The uncertainty of Oracle's free tier is enough to kill a project before launch. Paid resources not cleaned up after the 30-day trial expires will be charged directly to your credit card.
For individual professionals: if you need overseas cloud resources for development and testing, prioritize AWS or GCP free tiers—registration risk control is currently relatively friendly to Chinese users, and resource availability is more stable.
For the consumer market: the barrier to entry for overseas SaaS will continue to rise for Chinese users—this is not a single vendor's behavior but an industry trend. Comparable free resources from domestic cloud providers (Alibaba Cloud/Tencent Cloud trial packages) are worth reconsidering for value.