I initially assumed they would try and trick people into using paid services (e.g. by exceeding bandwith or storage limits), but that doesn't seem to be the case. From what I can gather, you would need to explicitly move into a paid tier.
But... Oracle have a certain reputation as I'm sure everyone here knows. Are there any users who can give me some confidence I'm not going to get hit with a massive bill for accidentally clicking some trivial button?
You're agreeing to get audited by Oracle's lawyers and contacted by their sales just by having an account. Free is too much for doing anything with Oracle, they cannot and should not be trusted.
Generally speaking, I have no complaint. Only yesterday my nodes lost public v4 IP and I have to go into portal and add v4 IP back. Since it's free tier the public IP changes. V6 IP was not affected.
free is never free and it has nothing to do with Oracle. If it comes to you at no cost from a commercial company, generally but not always, you are the product for sale.
OTOH, and for your consideration, both Solaris and VirtualBox are free (for noncommercial use) products from Oracle.
