There is a lot of good advice and (even better) intent here, and I gave it a ♡ despite not entirely agreeing with all details of tone, etc., …
I really wish this one was emphasized structurally—e.g., as its own pinned (a.k.a. sticky) thread, a dedicated Payment and Account forum category, a mention on the Billing page of the dashboard, …
One thing that can help with documents such as this is to order it with the top two or three most crucial tips first, then consensus advice that basically everyone agrees with—but harried posters might forget in the heat of the moment—then the broader philosphical discursions and motivations, and finally any parts that are your own personal views (weakly or strongly held).
I’ve said broadly similar things in the past (and still believe them!), but this might need additional disclaimers—about it maybe not being Fly.io’s own view and/or aspirations. (I don’t actually know for sure, myself.)
For example, in their recent job posting for an Elixir-heavy UI role (which maybe went unfilled?), they said that they intend to be…
[…] a public cloud platform that has the ergonomics of “platform as a service” offerings like Heroku, but the power, flexibility, and economics of a hyperscalar cloud.
That’s neat! and I know you weren’t arguing against it. But that overall “should be magic” drift, combined with “RX” threads and blog posts, possibly indicates a different line of thinking than your (5) paragraph.
I think this is an overestimate, but I really see where you’re coming from…
One thing that might have been overlooked is that old-timers remember the days when the forum was the place to contact Fly.io employees. And some have lifetime discounts, or similar, due to having been very early adopters. This might lead to a guess that the former pattern of posting a vague “not working sometimes” yet still getting a resolution from someone who went and checked via the backend would continue informally.
Also, many users have stated explicitly that they just don’t understand the phenomenon of paying for something and then not being able to contact the company in any way.
Consequently, any link or button that has “support” in the name, regardless of a “community” disclaimer preceding it, will tend to be assumed to be the sought-for contact mechanism that their model of commerce says does exist. This is like the industrial-design example of a door handle that is clearly labeled “push” yet looks exactly like a pull bar.
This is going to be super-hard to dissuade through PSAs, etc.
Anyway, just my own, weekend 2¢…