Theoretically they do. Practically I couldn't even get an account last time I tried (a few months ago). It would attempt to charge my credit card a 1 dollar "check the payment is working fee" and fail (even though the charge was going through successfully).

It just worked for me. The card verification page tried to launch Flash for some reason, but it worked even though my browser blocked it.

What is the catch here? That seems good enough to run most things on.

They offer 2 free Oracle databases. The catch is they're Oracle databases.

In other words it's the same as every cloud provider: They hope you'll build a business system that uses enough of their proprietary tech that you can't easily move to another provider.

You can run mysql on any other free database on the 2 free compute instances. It is totally up to you.

The autonomous database is Oracle's offering of their Oracle database - that requires no DBA or tuning and runs on Exadata infrastructure. They are offering it for free - because they want enterprises using existing on-premise Oracle databases, to move their existing DB applications to the cloud.

Oracle Autonomous databases comes with free Oracle APEX - which is a low code / no code toolchain.

You get 1/8 OCPU per VPS