@SerialDesignationN I hear you, it’s quite unfortunate, but Netlify do have a bit of a history of introducing their price increases either “under the guise of” or “in tandem with” new features.
The introduction of credit based pricing was also a price increase for most use cases.
We actually ceased hosting with them a few years ago when they did a similar thing by introducing the “git contributor” concept, as per: https://answers.netlify.com/t/still-dont-understand-pricing-especially-with-clients-creating-their-own-account/104109/2.
I believe by Netlify’s logic, to reduce your usage you should be trying to perform as many builds as you can as a “preview deploy”, which apparently don’t consume credits.
I can’t advise on specifics, but you should check:
https://docs.netlify.com/deploy/deploy-types/deploy-previews/