I started using Render after Heroku shut down their free plans, and now I got an unexpected $10 bill because I overused building hours. It was my own fault because I was on vacation and using Render as a development environment, so I don’t mind paying, although it’s a bit disingenuous that it still says “Free Plan” and not “Individual” on my dashboard. I had never been billed for a “free” service where I didn’t even had to put a credit card in.
However, is there anyway I can make sure this doesn’t happen again? If my app goes haywire for whatever reason, I’d like it to just shutdown.
The good news is that we’re already working on a fix for this and you’ll get getting a full refund for this. Your ‘Build Minutes Spend Limit’ (on the billing page) is set to zero but our billing system failed to honour that which resulted in you being incorrectly charged.
Regarding “free plan”, it’s a bit confusing, Individual plan relates to your account itself, whilst any service you deploy uses instances of any type, paid or free, in this case, you’re using a free instance type. Again, we have work in flight to improve this.