And per many anecdotes on HN it's not just a "may" - I recall reading about people who had been prompted to upgrade to some paid tier, and upon declining their free tier account was closed.

From what I've seen, there's actually two different levels of free tier. There's the one where you make an account and don't give them your payment info, and are on a free trial (availability of Ampere servers is severely limited in this, and they deactivate your account if you don't sign in often enough or use the servers you create), and the other where you give them payment information and set up a real account and get credits towards 200GB storage and the free tier compute.

My guess is that people who complain about their stuff being deleted are on the former.

"may" is that English word that non-natives learn too late that it actually means "will".

I remember when I first moved to England and my boss told me I may work on x and I thought that it is optional so I did something else.

Also good luck creating an account in the first place. Their shitty fraud checking partner keeps rejecting perfectly legit credit cards even after they've been verified with 3D secure check.