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.
What you get on Free Tier
- An Always Free Autonomous Database 23ai — REST enabled, in-database document search
- NoSQL tables and Object Storage buckets
- Containerised applications on an Always Free Arm VM: Grafana, the React and FastAPI starters, Streamlit, an MCP server, or your own image or Git repo
- The same chat, the same priced plan before anything is built, the same expiry that destroys the sandbox when its lifetime ends
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.
What you don't get, said up front
Always Free doesn't include these, so the factory declines them before it builds anything rather than failing ten minutes in:
- Kafka (Streaming with Apache Kafka)
- Functions
- Data Flow (Spark, Iceberg) and Data Catalog
- Queue
- API Gateway and extra Container Instances — applications run on the worker VM instead, over plain HTTP
- Paid database tiers, and Select AI
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.
Install
One Resource Manager stack, about 15 minutes, in your home region.
- Repo and the Deploy button: https://github.com/ashishsinha1602/oci-sandbox-factory
- What the Free Tier edition can and cannot build: https://github.com/ashishsinha1602/oci-sandbox-factory/blob/main/docs/FREE-TIER.md
- Overview and cost breakdown: https://ashishsinha1602.github.io/oci-sandbox-factory/
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.
