This is not unique, unfortunately. I have been battling with them for the last two months now and I am in the process of moving everything away from DigitalOcean. Something has changed over there and they have zero tolerance concerning everything.
My account was overdue by $10 (after being paid on time for close to 5 years), I asked for a deadline extension of 1 week and it was declined. They have already turned off all of my droplets and are now threatening to delete everything with no recourse within the next three days.
Again, not unwilling to pay, I was merely asking for an extension by 7 days for $10 and they declined my request.
Vultr, you can get your first month free through various referral / promotion links, where your first month’s spend (up to $50-200 depending on the link) is gratis (after you’ve added a legit payment method)
Get yourself an Oracle cloud freetier. It's free and you can get 2x 1Ram1CPU x86 VM's and any combination of 24Ram4CPU arm64 VM's. There is also a bunch of other resources that you get access to. Be aware of VM reclamation, but it is easy to work around it.
From my experience, it's really hard to create an account and upgrade your account to PAYG. People saying you need that if you want to get the free tier VM because the free tier VM keep out of stock.
I need to email the customer support to make an account and even then to change my account to PAYG account, I need to register the credit card again, they keep rejecting my credit card even though that is the same credit card that I used for my account and the test payment go through.
After that I just give up and go with Hetzner (same you need to email CS) but I can start paying them immediately after the account created.
I had a different experience. I upgraded a free account last year without needing email anyone. And only did that to use some non-free feature. I had no problems creating free tier compute instances but maybe it depends on region, I'm in Ashburn.
Same I'm on a paid account, currently running a Kubernetes cluster for free is Phoenix. No issues converting from the free account and only once wasn't able to provision one of the ARM vms, and just provisioning in a different AZ worked.
When I signed up and put in my credit card details, they immediately cancelled my order and completely deleted my account. I had to resort to moaning at them on twitter to get them to unblock me, which they did. Bit of a rubbish start to the journey though.
Very strange, I've heard of multiple people having these sorts of issues with them, but it just worked when I signed up. Maybe they have some overzealous fraud detection going on?
This very much sounds like silent sacking that is happening at a lot of big companies. That way they do not have to say they are doing layoffs - https://changelog.com/podcast/573
