Tried it but it wouldn't take my card without making a deposit of $5. Have no idea why. Guess I'll stick to the Oracle free tier.

It might be because it thinks your card is "prepaid". I tried a Wise card and it didn't work, but a normal credit card from the bank worked.

The payment method also cannot be attached to a different account

This is tiny compared to oracle's free offerings anyway. (Up to 4 vms with a lot more ram, disk space and cpu)

I've read about a lot of people having their Oracle free tier abruptly terminated with no reason stated and not allowed to download their data either. I wouldn't trust them after reading that.

As a precaution I am seeing that a lot of people are moving to a paid account without actually using any paid service.

In my use case I am taking offsite backups in the event that the service might be discontinued. I don't have anything hosted there that I couldn't stand to be off for a few days.

Note

> We are prioritizing access for users who request it by completing the form, and will be incrementally granting access to users who sign up for Vultr with a business email address.

  >To be eligible to apply for early access to the Free Tier Program, accounts must have the following:
  >Credit Card
  >To be eligible for a Free Tier instance you must have a regular credit card on file with us. Prepaid cards are not an acceptable payment type for Free Tier eligibility, neither is PayPal, Crypto, etc.

Er... no thanks. Why do you need my credit card if it's free?

Because this is an offering that could easily be abused (crypto-mining, DDoS, bot farms). Requiring credit cards stops people from making many accounts.

To hold you accountable for the things you do with their network maybe?

"Oh no" is my initial reaction.

I can't help but think this is a bad idea for Vultr's paying customers. I hope free users have a separate network and separate physical computers from paying customers.

Yeah, this pretty much means that I'm reconsidering everything I have on Vultr.

I hope they know what they're doing ...

I've already had to contact Vultr in the past due to a "noisy neighbour" impacting my relatively low traffic website. I can't shake the feeling that I'm about to get a lot more noisy neighbours...