Nothing was deployed. Zip, zero, zilch resources were used month-on-month. My fault, yes, but naively I assumed if this was the case, billing would automatically drop to zero.
Whilst I bought access to X servers but had no way to remove the charge associated with that without contacting customer services when I decided X=0, permanently.
I mean, really? I have no problem with PAYG or PAYG to a capped amount, but PAYG for a fixed amount regardless of whether or not the resources are actually deployed is disingenuous at best.
This is like leasing a car, leaving it parked, and then complaining you have to pay the lease.
You don't complain that you were charged $200 for renting a parking space and never using it, no reason for this to be different for servers.
If your droplet isn't using all of it's resources (CPU, RAM, DISK), they are able to oversell their capacity.
There's a difference between load balancing of shared resources and (what I believe must be) deliberately deceptive practices. A customer-centric company would send an email to notify you of this kind of over-charging.
It's premeditated and dispicable.
The pricing model for App Platform seems antithesis to that, though, which is interesting. DO is becoming more like AWS/GCP with every feature release, which I don't necessarily find to be a good thing.