[matt_heimer]

I had a different experience. I upgraded a free account last year without needing email anyone. And only did that to use some non-free feature. I had no problems creating free tier compute instances but maybe it depends on region, I'm in Ashburn.

[Volundr]

Same I'm on a paid account, currently running a Kubernetes cluster for free is Phoenix. No issues converting from the free account and only once wasn't able to provision one of the ARM vms, and just provisioning in a different AZ worked.