From my experience, it's really hard to create an account and upgrade your account to PAYG. People saying you need that if you want to get the free tier VM because the free tier VM keep out of stock.
I need to email the customer support to make an account and even then to change my account to PAYG account, I need to register the credit card again, they keep rejecting my credit card even though that is the same credit card that I used for my account and the test payment go through.
After that I just give up and go with Hetzner (same you need to email CS) but I can start paying them immediately after the account created.
