I had just managed to get my website up 9 hours ago, then 7.5 hours ago I received an email my trial expires in 3 days, perfect I thought, just enough time to conclude I am satisfied with this website and start a paid membership. Then 5 hours ago I get another email telling me my trial ended. This is very discouraging, what can I do?
Hm… That was a confusing sequence of email messages, and understandably a little discouraging, but the expiration itself doesn’t really sound like a bug to me. Rather, my guess is that it was just a consequence of the fact that free trial expiration depends on resources consumed and not only on elapsed calendar days:
If you hit any of the limits below before your 7 days are up, your trial is considered exhausted, and your apps will stop until you add a payment method.
If you have only 3 days of experimentation left, then that typically wouldn’t be a large bill (at the end of January), if you did opt to continue now, under Pay as You Go. There isn’t a membership fee. Be sure to check for excess resources that you might still have allocated, though, 
. Sometimes people unknowingly end up with multiple Managed Postgres clusters, volumes, etc.
I recall looking at the latest details of the trial period, and I found it rather poor; it feels insufficient to conduct a meaningful test of the system.
However, I think the “no bills collected below $5 USD” is still a thing, even for new sign-ups. @mayailurus is this documented anywhere, do you recall? I wonder if it’s not something that Fly want to contractually guarantee forever, even though it’s nice for those of us who receive it.
No, it’s meticulously not documented, is how I interpret it—although we both are mere outside observers on this, of course, 
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It’s been mentioned in the forum multiple times and once in the newsletter, but the most authoritative instance said only that they “currently waive” (as a way to avoid surprising people with tiny bills—for things that they didn’t even realize they’d provisioned). I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it disappeared soon…
[It’s more common in my experience for US companies to accumulate small charges, until the grand total exceeds their overhead for a credit-card transaction.]
Yeah, it is pretty thin. As I recall, the resource limits were added retroactively, and weren’t part of the original concept.
(Likely that was done as part of their neverending battle against people using things like this for cryptocurrency mining, etc.)
Fly.io really believes in having some freebie way to try out the system, though, from what they’ve said in the past…
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I am somewhat amused that I have an AWS bill that “charges” me exactly £0.01 every month for the storage of Docker images, and I can only vaguely recall what these images do, and I know I don’t use them, and it’s hardly worth the effort of digging out an old project and an old account and applying some head-scratching. I don’t recall this bill has ever actually been applied…
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