Hmm. Yeah. It’s pretty great that you can spin up a droplet and use it for hours and pay pennies. In practice, I almost never do that and I have tooling that makes it almost trivial (I do have to edit a text file and insert the droplet ip). I can do the work of creating a droplet with a standard install in about a minute (maybe three?).
I think that most Normal People aren’t affected much by whether it’s hourly or monthly, as the hard part is setting it up. If the minimum is 3 or 6 months then it might start to matter.