If there's any confusion about this, look at nearlyfreespeech.net.
You deposit funds (let's say $20) into your account, and as your site consumes resources, it draws from your balance. So $20 is $20. If you set up a crummy low-traffic blog and that $20 lasts four months, then fine. If it lasts two weeks and then there's a surge in traffic, or the server hits some bug that causes it to spiral out of control, then your site gets killed when your balance hits $0. You can set up alerts, but there's a hard limit for how much you can be charged—it's whatever funds you deposited into your account. (Really, that's not even the right way to put it, because you're charged at the moment you deposit them.)
This isn't acceptable for everybody—many businesses would prefer to stay up and be billed after-the-fact. But that use cases is already well-served by the industry. (Overserved, really.) The market segment where the alternative situation is the best fit (pretty much every hobbiest who isn't bringing in a single cent off their side project) is extremely underserved. NFSN is the only provider I know of that even offers this.