Oracle Cloud Pricing: A Comprehensive Guide To Oracle Cloud Costs

In 2025, Oracle shocked the market.

Its cloud growth was so aggressive that Oracle’s stock surged, briefly making founder Larry Ellison the world’s richest person.

That didn’t happen by accident.

Oracle closed fiscal 2025 with $57.4 billion in revenue, mainly driven by cloud services.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) grew roughly 50% year over year, driven by enterprise databases, AI workloads, and network-intensive applications migrating from more expensive platforms.

Despite holding a smaller share of the cloud market than AWS and Azure, Oracle is now one of the fastest-growing hyperscale cloud providers. Enterprises aren’t adopting OCI for brand loyalty. They’re adopting it because its pricing model is different.

And that difference matters.

Oracle Cloud doesn’t price the way AWS or Azure does. Compute scales differently. Network egress follows different rules. Database costs are structured around licenses, not just usage.

For some workloads, OCI delivers major cost advantages.

This guide breaks down Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) pricing at the model level — including how OCPUs, memory, storage, networking, database licensing, and committed spend are actually priced, how those costs scale in real environments, and where OCI’s pricing mechanics differ materially from AWS and Azure.

How Oracle Cloud Pricing Works

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) pricing is based on consumption. You pay for the infrastructure resources you provision and run, measured in units such as OCPU hours, memory GB-hours, storage GB-months, and network port hours.

Oracle Cloud pricing models

Primary Oracle Cloud cost drivers include:

Oracle offers several pricing models:

Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO)

You pay standard rates for the resources you use, with no long-term commitment. Charges accrue based on actual consumption, such as OCPU hours, storage used, and network traffic.

This model offers maximum flexibility, though it does not include committed-spend discounts.

Pay-As-You-Go is typically used for short-lived, variable, or experimental workloads, but is more expensive than Universal Credits for steady-state production usage.

Universal credits (committed spend)

You commit to spending a fixed amount on Oracle Cloud over a set term in exchange for discounted rates. These credits can be used across most OCI services.

Credits are flexible across workloads but expire at the end of the commitment period if unused.

Universal Credits are Oracle’s primary discount mechanism and apply across most OCI services, rather than being tied to specific instance families or service types.

Volume discounts

As usage increases, Oracle applies lower effective rates to some services. These discounts are reflected automatically based on consumption levels or contract terms.

They reward steady, large-scale usage rather than short bursts.

Bring Your Own License (BYOL)

For eligible services, you can apply existing Oracle software licenses to reduce cloud costs. Infrastructure is billed separately from the license.

This model can lower total spend for organizations with existing entitlements.

Always Free Resources 

Oracle offers a set of services that remain free within defined limits, including limited compute, storage, and networking resources.

These services are intended for development, testing, and small workloads, not production-scale systems.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Service Pricing

Each Oracle cloud service has its own billing units, rates, and cost drivers. Your total cloud bill is the sum of how these services are provisioned and consumed.

Oracle Cloud compute pricing

Compute pricing is based on OCPUs and memory and is billed per hour. 

OCI compute pricing separates CPU and memory, allowing teams to size each independently instead of purchasing fixed instance bundles.

One OCPU represents one physical CPU core, which maps to two vCPUs on x86 processors. CPU and memory are priced separately on most flexible VM shapes.

List pricing for standard x86 virtual machines is $0.0255 per OCPU hour, with memory priced at $0.0015 per GB hour. 

Example: A VM with 1 OCPU and 8 GB of RAM will cost $0.0375 per hour at list rates.

OCPU: 1 × $0.0255 = $0.0255/hour

Memory: 8 × $0.0015 = $0.0120/hour

Total: $0.0375 per hour

This pricing structure is often more cost-efficient for memory-heavy or database-driven workloads than bundled instance pricing models.

Oracle offers flexible virtual machines, bare metal instances, Arm-based Ampere shapes, and GPU configurations. Eligible Ampere A1 Arm instances are included in the Always Free tier, which provides up to 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB memory hours per month.

Note: Compute pricing is consistent across all Oracle Cloud regions.

Oracle Cloud storage pricing

OCI provides several options for cloud storage:

See the detailed Oracle Cloud storage pricing here.

Oracle Cloud networking pricing

OCI networking costs cover data transfer and traffic management services.

OCI networking uses fewer pricing variables than AWS and Azure, which makes network costs easier to forecast in data-intensive architectures.

Other networking components include:

Oracle database pricing

Oracle database pricing is determined by deployment model and license approach. Customers either purchase databases with included licenses or apply existing licenses via BYOL. 

Infrastructure and software costs are clearly separated. This separation makes database licensing a core pricing decision in OCI, rather than an embedded or opaque cost.

Autonomous database (license included)

Autonomous database pricing is billed per OCPU-hour and per GB of storage per month

Auto-scaling can increase OCPU usage when enabled, which directly increases cost during peak demand.

Without active monitoring, database auto-scaling can materially increase OCI costs during sustained peak usage.

Autonomous database (BYOL)

For customers with existing Oracle Database licenses, Autonomous Database can be deployed under BYOL pricing, reducing the hourly rate.

BYOL customers are responsible for maintaining valid licenses and support contracts.

Oracle database cloud service (DB systems – license included)

Database cloud service runs Oracle databases on VM or bare-metal infrastructure, with the license included.

This option is commonly used for workloads requiring OS-level control.

Oracle database cloud service (BYOL)

With BYOL, customers pay only for infrastructure while applying existing Oracle database licenses.

Note: License-to-OCPU conversion rules apply and must match Oracle licensing terms.

Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) pricing

Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) pricing depends on the cluster type you choose and the infrastructure resources your workloads consume. OKE combines a low-cost or free control plane with standard OCI infrastructure pricing, simplifying Kubernetes cost modeling. 

Oracle offers a basic cluster option with no control-plane fee and an enhanced option with an SLA-backed control-plane charge.

Useful Kubernetes resources:

How Oracle Cloud Pricing Differs From AWS And Azure

Oracle Cloud prices compute, storage, and networking in clear units and applies discounts through a single committed-spend model. AWS and Azure use more service-specific pricing and multiple discount programs.

This affects how costs scale and how organizations plan and manage cloud spend.

1. Infrastructure-based pricing vs service-based pricing

OCI prices infrastructure components more directly. Compared to AWS and Azure, OCI prices infrastructure components more directly using consistent infrastructure units. Compute, storage, networking, and databases are billed using the same units, such as OCPUs, GB-months, and port hours.

By contrast, AWS and Azure rely more heavily on layered managed services. Pricing often includes additional abstraction costs that sit above raw infrastructure.

As a result, OCI bills tend to reflect what you provision, while AWS and Azure bills often reflect how services interact.

Related reads:

2. Fewer pricing models, fewer discount layers

AWS and Azure offer multiple overlapping pricing models: on-demand, reserved capacity, savings plans, spot pricing, service-specific discounts, and enterprise agreements. Effective pricing depends on stacking these correctly.

Oracle consolidates discounting through universal credits. You commit to spend, not specific services, and discounts apply across most of the platform.

Read more:

3. Network costs are more predictable

OCI includes generous outbound data allowances and simpler network pricing structures. Main networking services have flat, published rates, and private connectivity does not incur per-GB transfer fees.

AWS and Azure networking costs vary widely by service path, region, and architecture pattern. This variability often makes AWS and Azure networking costs harder to predict at scale than OCI networking.

4. Database pricing is structural, not add-on

Oracle integrates database licensing directly into pricing or allows BYOL with defined OCPU conversion rules. This makes database cost a first-order pricing decision, not a hidden add-on.

In AWS and Azure, database costs are embedded in managed services, with fewer licensing permutations but less flexibility for enterprises with existing entitlements.

5. Global pricing is more consistent

OCI generally applies uniform pricing across regions for the major services. The same compute shape or storage tier costs the same across all geographies.

AWS and Azure frequently price services differently by region, which adds complexity for global architectures and cost forecasting.

Related read: How AWS Regions Affect Cloud Costs (And How To Reduce Fees)

But this doesn’t mean Oracle cloud pricing is “cheaper”

It is different, as we mentioned earlier.

For stable database workloads, OCI can be highly cost-effective. OCI is often most cost-effective for stable, database-centric, network-intensive enterprise workloads. Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, and Azure databases tend to be more expensive.

For fast-changing, highly abstracted application stacks, costs can still grow in unexpected ways.

That’s why pricing knowledge alone isn’t enough. Understanding OCI pricing mechanics is necessary, but sustainable cost optimization requires visibility into how infrastructure costs map to real workloads and business outcomes.

Key takeaways:

How To Understand And Optimize Oracle Cloud Costs With CloudZero

Optimizing Oracle cloud costs starts with understanding the native cost management tools Oracle provides and where their visibility ends.

Here is the thing: these tools focus on cost reporting, not cost understanding.

OCI native cost tools do not:

CloudZero adds the missing layer of context

CloudZero connects OCI billing data to applications, services, teams, environments, and customers, enabling cost optimization beyond raw service-level reporting. It also ingests OCI billing data and maps costs to what actually matters: customers, teams, environments, services, databases, and Kubernetes workloads. Instead of reviewing spend by service name, teams see costs in terms of business impact.

With CloudZero, organizations can finally answer questions such as:

CloudZero already manages over $14 billion in cloud spend for organizations that needed real cloud visibility and accountability. With CloudZero, Upstart reduced loud costs by $20 million. PicPay saved $18.6 million. Drift achieved a $2.4 million reduction in cloud spend. You can achieve outcomes like these, too. Take a product and to see CloudZero in action.

Author: Lyne Carolyne

Lyne Carolyne has several years of experience in FinOps and cloud economics and brings that understanding into the content she creates. Outside work, she's an avid explorer.