My OCI sandbox factory now installs on a Free Tier account, with no card

A developer released a Free Tier edition of their OCI sandbox factory, a chat-driven tool that spins up and tears down Oracle Cloud sandboxes, allowing it to run on an Oracle Cloud Free Tier account with no payment method attached. The free edition runs its worker on an Always Free Arm VM (VM.Standard.A1.Flex, 2 OCPU, 12 GB) under podman and uses the Google Gemini API with a user-supplied free AI Studio key instead of OCI Generative AI, declining unsupported resources before building. The Terraform for the install and each sandbox type is public under Apache-2.0, with setup taking about 15 minutes via one Resource Manager stack in the user's home region.

Every time I showed people the thing I built — a chat that spins up Oracle Cloud sandboxes and deletes them when their time is up — the reply was the same. Nice, but I would need a paid tenancy and an admin to try it, so I won't. That was fair. So I made a Free Tier edition. Pick Edition: free on the install form and it runs on an Oracle Cloud Free Tier account with no payment method attached , on Always Free resources only. The worker is one Always Free Arm VM VM.Standard.A1.Flex , 2 OCPU, 12 GB running the same worker image under podman, instead of Container Instances. The assistant uses the Google Gemini API with your own free key from AI Studio, instead of OCI Generative AI. Without a key the one-click starters and the form still work. Always Free doesn't include these, so the factory declines them before it builds anything rather than failing ten minutes in: Two more worth knowing. Always Free allows two databases per tenancy and the factory's control database is one of them, so it is one database sandbox at a time — destroy it or let it expire before the next. And Always Free capacity is shared, so a VM or database can come back "out of capacity" at a busy moment. That is Oracle, not the factory. Try again later. One Resource Manager stack, about 15 minutes, in your home region. Apache-2.0. The Terraform for the install and for every sandbox type is public, so you can read exactly what lands in your tenancy before you run it. If you try it on Free Tier and something is declined that you expected to work, tell me in the comments — that list is the part I most want to get right.