Comment by emacdona

I appreciate you stepping in and clarifying. Thank you.

But honestly, this feels like damage control. This is (to me) clearly an innovation on a dark pattern that is basically just "accepted practice" nowadays, namely the "subscribe by default; make it hard to opt-out of said subscription at signup time".

That's why I think people are upset about this. By not taking a credit card, you made it feel like it wasn't an implementation of that dark pattern (yay!) -- however, secretly, it was!

If the intent is to be customer friendly, it's so perfectly clear to me what the answer is. OPT-IN. In other words, a checkbox:

"By default, when your free credits are consumed, all of your runners will be de-provisioned. Instead, if you would prefer that your runners continue working, check this box and we will invoice you for usage in excess of your free credits."

But honestly, you did more than I expect of most service providers today. You sent an email; you actually told them how many credits were left in the free tier. AWS, for example, can only give me an _estimate_ of how much cost I've accrued. They can make no promises about the rate at which I'm expected to accrue new costs. And, unless I've taken great care (by, say, terraforming every resource in a given AWS account), "turning off my cost accruing services" is not a simple matter. If I understood the article correctly, there was, at least, a "single action" they could have taken to immediately stop accruing costs.