They are squeezing the free tier hard to monetize. It never made sense in the first place (they don't have their own servers, they host on AWS). It probably cost them something like $10-15/free customer. That's as bad or worst than many of the AI startup burning money to acquire customers. Also the free tier is good for most people, so why pay up?

I got my DB paused a few times despite it being active (the irony is that I have an inactive DB that was not affected).