> Can you get that without adding a payment mechanism?

No!

There are actually two free tiers.

The limited free tier you get without adding a CC and then this advanced "always free" tier I am using, where you have to use and verify a CC and have to pay big bucks if you mess up.

limited free tier: 300$ to be spent in 30 days

advanced always free tier: https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...

Messing up with Oracle is a bit different from messing up with Google. I'll go with Hetzner which I love anyway. :)

So it's free... Until is not. My take on this would be that if Oracle makes any change to that "free" tier and you do not take proper action you might be automatically charged hefty amounts from your credit card. No, thanks. It's way way safer to spend few bucks a month in other VPS options than get a big surprise on your credit card.

I know Oracle are notorious for scummy license enforcement, but in practice their Always Free tier is superior to Amazon's precisely because they will cut off your service rather than bill you arbitrary (huge) amounts.

The big limitation is the 10mbit egress bandwidth, but you can work around that with (free) Cloudflare.

Privacy.com has always been a working general solution to this, for me. Disposable CC aliases with spending caps.

Privacy.com won't provide lawyers to you when Oracle sends letters of demand to you for unpaid invoices.