In New Jersey I have to let an attendant pump my gas. If I have a heart attack while he’s pumping gas, but I never explicitly say “please stop once it’s full” and he, innocently enough, takes the still-flowing gas hose and pops it into a sewer grate once my tank is full, you’d be hard-pressed to find a reasonable person agree that the attendant was throwing me a lifeline when he refunds me after I come back complaining about my $2k gas receipt.
This is a dumb analogy, but the point is there is very obviously a pattern in this payment process that is ripe for abuse. The question of whether or not you aim to be an abusive business, plucking every shady profit where you can put the onus on the customer to try to come get their money back is one that many companies are deciding, and many are erring in the direction of the dark pattern.
By not working to avoid this problem from the get go, there is an implication about how a company wants to make their profits.
Pay for what I use works for airline seats and reserved compute/storage resources.
I have no control over how much traffic my public sites get. There is zero value in me signing up for a service which charges me based on traffic if I can’t control the maximum they’ll charge me. Would you sign up for an infinite bill?
the CEO said they're "forgiving any bills from legitimate mistakes" which effectively means "just make everything zero dollars bro".
And no, he didn't use all that bandwidth, he was victim of a DDoS which the hosting provider should have measures in place to prevent or limit the service if it happens.
Perhaps a bit ignorant, but to be fair that Netlify attempted to charge him is absolutely ridiculous. With my hosting provider, I would pay a whopping 50 EUR for the same bandwidth that he was asked to pay 104.5K USD for. That just shouldn't be possible to happen, especially on a free tier.
OP was ignorant, and got tossed a lifeline. Also “just make everything zero dollars bro” is a ridiculous proposition.