| Category | AWS Free Tier | Azure Free Tier | GCP Free Tier | Oracle Cloud Free Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trial Credits | $300 (30 days) | $200 (30 days) | $300 (90 days) | $300 (30 days) |
| Compute (VMs) | 750 hours/month (t2.micro/t3.micro) | 750 hours (B1s VM) | 1 f1-micro VM (US only) | 4 OCPUs & 24 GB RAM (ARM) or 2 AMD VMs (1 OCPU, 1GB each) |
| Block Storage | 30 GB EBS | 64 GB SSD + 2 HDD | 30 GB (20 GB HDD + 10 GB SSD) | 200 GB |
| Object Storage | 5 GB S3 | 5 GB Blob Storage | 5 GB | 20 GB |
| Database | 750 hours RDS (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server) | 250 GB SQL DB | 1x f1-micro Cloud SQL (US only) | 2x Autonomous DB (1 OCPU, 20 GB each) |
| Load Balancer | No free ALB/NLB | No free LB | No free LB | 1 Flexible LB (10 Mbps) |
| Egress Bandwidth | 100 GB free/month | 15 GB free/month | 1 GB free/month | 10 TB free/month |
| Kubernetes | 750 hours EKS | 750 hours AKS | Free GKE control plane | Free OKE control plane |
| NoSQL DB | DynamoDB (25 GB) | CosmosDB (400 RU/s) | Firestore (50K reads/day) | 133M reads/month |
| Monitoring | 1M CloudWatch metrics | Free Azure Monitor | 150K Ops/Month | 500M ingestion, 1B retrievals/month |
| Secrets Manager | 1,000 secrets API calls | 50,000 operations/month | 10 secret versions | 20,000 secrets |
Key Observations
✅ Best Free Compute: Oracle Cloud (4 OCPUs & 24 GB RAM beats others).
✅ Best Free Storage: Oracle Cloud (200 GB Block Storage, AWS only gives 30 GB).
✅ Best Free Bandwidth: Oracle Cloud (10 TB vs. AWS 100 GB, Azure 15 GB, GCP 1 GB).
✅ Best Free Databases: Oracle Cloud (2 Autonomous DBs), while others have time-based limits.
✅ Best Free Kubernetes: GCP (Free GKE control plane), but Oracle also provides free OKE.
Final Verdict
- Oracle Cloud: ✅ Best for lifetime free compute, storage, and DB.
- AWS: ✅ Best for developer tools, global coverage, and serverless services.
- Azure: ✅ Best for Microsoft ecosystem (Windows, SQL Server, Active Directory, etc.).
- GCP: ✅ Best for AI/ML and Kubernetes (longest free trial—90 days).
