If you run a small rental fleet — say 5 to 25 e-bikes or scooters — paying $10–30 per device per month to a fleet management SaaS adds up fast. Oracle Cloud’s Always Free Tier gives you a VM with 1 OCPU and 1 GB RAM that runs Traccar comfortably for small fleets at zero cost.

What you need

• Oracle Cloud account (free, no credit card required for Always Free resources)
• A domain or subdomain pointed at your VM IP (via Cloudflare)
• 30–60 minutes

Steps

1. Provision an Always Free VM

In the Oracle Cloud console, create a Compute instance using the Always Free shape (VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro). Choose Ubuntu 22.04. Note the public IP.

2. Install Traccar

wget https://www.traccar.org/download/traccar-linux-64.zip
unzip traccar-linux-64.zip
sudo ./traccar.run
sudo systemctl enable traccar
sudo systemctl start traccar

Traccar listens on port 8082 by default.

3. Set up Cloudflare Tunnel (recommended)

Rather than opening ports directly, use a Cloudflare Tunnel to expose your Traccar instance at traccar.yourdomain.com. This keeps your VM’s IP private and adds DDoS protection for free.

4. Connect your devices

Add your devices in Traccar using their IMEI or identifier. Most GPS-enabled IoT hardware (Teltonika, Omni, Segway, etc.) supports the Traccar protocol or a compatible variant.

5. Wire up GopalDesk

Point GopalDesk at your Traccar hostname. The Cloudflare Worker handles auth so your credentials stay server-side.

For fleets under 25 devices this setup runs entirely on free infrastructure.