For sure, and I'm not disputing your experience at all but there are hundreds of much vaguer "they're a bad company" style posts that don't have direct experien

For sure, and I'm not disputing your experience at all but there are hundreds of much vaguer "they're a bad company" style posts that don't have direct experience though. It's entirely possible that they've improved some of the cost monitoring and management facilities as well. Under "Governance and Administration" you can set a budget -- notably budgets are alerts and not hard budgets, so one should act accordingly -- not only based on actual spend, but even for period forecast spend. It's a great rapid awareness if you accidentally enable a pay feature. There are also regularly updated graphs showing the daily spend charted by source of cost, along with multiple-per-day CSVs with billing details. Another way the Oracle cloud actually helps is that it actually isolates you to a single region (you have to go through a process to do otherwise), so it's harder to have the situation people would encounter on Amazon where they'd accidentally create some resource off in some other region and then it's effectively invisible but costly (though AWS now has the global dashboard that really improved that). What is "free" or not could be clearer. For instance they have a terminology issue with a conflict between "Free tier" and "always free". Sometimes they use the former to refer to things during the trial period. Sometimes they use the latter to refer to resources that are free forever even after you've upgraded to an ostensibly pay account. It is confusing. And they make the two AMD instances just straight "always free", but for the ARM instance they give a monthly CPU/memory credit that allows you to run it for 31 days. And then you have to search on various other things you regularly do figure out what is free or not, and that information is dispersed. For instance you can have so many volume images beyond which they are charged, etc. Alas, I've been extremely pleased with the service. The console is a bit clunky in places but it works.