After more searching, I came across these threads:
- Having dedicated ip v4 address without opting it for it - #7 by ditsuke
- We are going to start charging for dedicated IPv4 in January 1st - #33 by mccutchen
They apparently decided to change this policy by posting to their message board rather than contacting any customers via email which…sucks… They also claim that you would start seeing previews in advance on your invoices but 1) I don’t get notifications about invoices, they’re always $0. 2) When I search through my recent invoices, there were no preview charges. The first appearance was in this latest bill and I was credited because “Free tier bonus” and again, not emailed that invoice or anything else.
I was able to follow the steps in the linked forums to remove my dedicated IP address and replace it with a shared IPv4 HOWEVER, I first released the dedicated IP, which immediately took my site down, then when I tried to allocate a shared one I got an error - it forced me to enter a credit card into my account, which I intentionally never did – before I could allocate a shared IP. But at that point my site was already offline so I had no choice but to do it.
Given that I had to go through this because of surprise billing, I am extremely unnerved that to resolve it I had to enter a credit card, which I intentionally never did before specifically so that I could avoid any surprise future bills if something like this ever were to happen.