To be clear, I had no deployed resources, but was still charged as if I had. As it turns out, it's impossible to cancel the "standing charge" without recourse to support.

There's a difference between load balancing of shared resources and (what I believe must be) deliberately deceptive practices. A customer-centric company would send an email to notify you of this kind of over-charging.

It's premeditated and dispicable.

What you call "premeditated and despicable" is actually a huge value proposition for others. Whereas AWS/GCP have pricing structures based on usage and you never know until the end of the month how much you owe, DO instead has defined "you will pay $50/mo for this regardless of if you do or do not use it" and from what I've seen, many people really value and appreciate that, and specifically choose DO over AWS/GCP because of that.

The pricing model for App Platform seems antithesis to that, though, which is interesting. DO is becoming more like AWS/GCP with every feature release, which I don't necessarily find to be a good thing.

The problem I have is not with the model, but with the fact it is so difficult to cancel the standing charge. If it could be done from the web UI, and/or there was an interlinked pop-up when zero droplets are deployed, fine.

Wait, I'm confused. What standing charge? What exactly did you get charged for? I've been using DO for a few years and I have no idea what you are referring to. When I delete my unused resources, I don't get charged.

He probably forgot to turn off the instances and kept getting charged.

Ah, right, shutdown but not deleted. DO are upfront about that charge though and its not like its any different on any other cloud provider.

I didn't say it wasn't a shitty outcome, but this is what people advocate for when there's a push "for the cloud" or "how aws is doing great things"