I had the same thing happen to me. I tried running a script for a month without luck (Sydney region). What did work was adding a credit card to upgrade to a paid account - no issues launching an instance, and it's still covered under the free tier.
Not OP, but I do the same for ~7 accounts across 5 institutions. There's no need to contact them since you can manually download the statements, but it's a chore if you're doing it frequently. I usually run my script a few times a week.
Some years ago, I was working at a small retail store and we built a new site, going live with Stripe in test mode. That one took a few months to notice.
> Jha and White co-founded a company called ProTraf Solutions, which provided anti-DDoS services to Minecraft servers. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But in order to create new customers, the pair started targeting websites with DDoS attacks and then either tried to extort money to call off the attacks or offered services which they claimed could defend the sites.
Check out some of the RK3588-based SBCs. The Orange Pi 5 Plus is a fantastic alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5 if you're okay with a bit of fiddling as mainline kernel support is still a work in progress.