Free Oracle Cloud: 14. Your Oracle Cloud Free Trial has expired (but FREE still running)

This post is the last post of a series of blog posts on the Best and Cheapest Oracle APEX hosting: Free Oracle Cloud.

Today I got an email that my Oracle Cloud account was Expired. While I have an Always FREE Oracle Cloud, when I signed up I also got some extra credits that lasted for a month. Those credits are no longer valid.

When you log in to your Oracle Cloud Dashboard you will get a notification on top too, but nothing to worry about.

It has some consequences tho, on the menu, some options are grayed out. The one I actually use is the Email Delivery, which seems to be grayed out too although normally you should be able to send 1,000 emails per month. So maybe grayed out also means, not full service.

When I checked it out, it said it’s part of the paid plan. I remember some discussions at Oracle Open World where they recommend upgrading to a Paid account, but as you only use the Always FREE services, you are not charged.

So I decided to upgrade to a Paid account: Pay As You Go:

You have to provide a Credit Card, but that was a bit of an issue for me. Apparently, Safari is not really working well with this screen, so I switched to Chrome. The next hick-up I had was when I added my AMEX card… it said it was an invalid card.

Then I used my VISA card and that seemed to work well:

Click the Start Paid Account:

Finally, it will say your payment method will be reviewed and after that you are live.

It wasn’t immediately clear for me I had to wait for the confirmation email, but when I went to Payment Method again, I saw the review was still in progress:

And a few minutes later I got the email that my account was upgraded:

When you look at your Oracle Cloud Dashboard, there’s a cost calculator, so you see how much you have to pay. As long as I use the Always FREE components, I expect the amount to stay 0 :)

But the nice thing now is that you have access to all of Oracle Cloud again (e.g. Email Delivery).