Cloud Hosting

What does DigitalOcean pricing actually cost in 2026?

Published 2026-11-04 · Researched and price-checked on official sources

DigitalOcean pricing starts at $4/mo for a 512 MiB Droplet and $6/mo for 1 GiB, both capped at 672 billable hours per month. The newer v5 configurations bill per resource with no cap, so 1 vCPU and 1 GiB runs about $17 over a 730-hour month. All rates below were verified on 4 November 2026.

Key facts

What matters

Bundled Basic Droplets cost $4/mo for 512 MiB, $6/mo for 1 GiB, $12/mo for 2 GiB and $24/mo for 4 GiB, and every bundled plan caps at 672 billable hours.
v5 Droplets bill the sum of vCPU, memory and boot disk, with no monthly cap: 1 shared vCPU plus 1 GiB and 25 GiB of disk works out to about $17 over 730 hours.
A powered-off Droplet still bills. DigitalOcean only stops the meter when you destroy the Droplet, and the same rule applies to GPU Droplets.
Outbound transfer beyond the pooled allowance costs $0.01 per GiB. Snapshots cost $0.06 per GB per month and backups add 20% (weekly) or 30% (daily) of the Droplet price.
Agent Droplets add subscription plans at $50/mo (Pro) and $200/mo (Team) with unlimited agents, unlimited seats and a 15% or 20% discount on DigitalOcean-hosted model usage.

How DigitalOcean prices its products

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider that sells virtual machines called Droplets alongside managed databases, object storage, GPU compute and, since 2026, agent hosting. Prices are published per product rather than as one bundle, and compute is billed by the second with a 60-second minimum or $0.01, whichever is higher.

The starting prices on the official pricing page, checked 4 November 2026:

Droplets: $4/mo, or $0.00595/hr, for the smallest 512 MiB plan.
Kubernetes: $12/mo, with a free control plane.
Managed databases: $15/mo for MongoDB, Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey or OpenSearch.
Spaces object storage: $5/mo.
Volumes block storage: $10/mo. Network File Storage starts at $0.15 per GiB per month, from 50 GiB.
Load balancers: $12/mo. Container Registry and App Platform both start at $0.
GPU Droplets: $0.76 per GPU hour on demand for an RTX 4000.
Agent Droplets: $50/mo for the Pro plan.

The number most buyers fixate on is the Droplet price, so that is where the rest of this page goes.

DigitalOcean Droplet pricing for bundled plans

Bundled Droplets are fixed shapes: RAM, vCPU, SSD and transfer are sold together at a flat monthly price, with a monthly cap so a busy month never costs more than the sticker. The table below reproduces the Basic Droplet rows from the official Droplet pricing page on 4 November 2026.

The $4 and $6 plans are the ones people actually buy for side projects. At $0.00595/hr, the $4 plan reaches its monthly cap at 672 hours (28 days), which is why the hourly and monthly numbers line up exactly rather than approximately.

The pricing page keeps Regular, Premium Intel and Premium AMD CPU options on separate tabs, so check which tab a quote came from before comparing it with your invoice. Premium variants are a different purchase decision, not a price for the same machine.

Why a v5 Droplet can cost three times the $6 plan

In select datacenters DigitalOcean now sells v5 configurations, where you pick vCPU, memory and boot disk independently and the hourly rate is the sum of those parts. Per the Droplet pricing documentation, last verified by DigitalOcean on 26 October 2026, the component rates are $0.0158219 per shared vCPU hour, $0.0040411 per GiB of memory hour, $0.000137 per GiB of boot disk hour, and $0.028 per general purpose vCPU hour.

Price a plain 1 vCPU, 1 GiB, 25 GiB box with those numbers: $0.0158219 + $0.0040411 + (25 x $0.000137) = $0.023288 per hour. Run it for a 730-hour month and you pay $17.00. The bundled 1 GiB Droplet with the same memory and disk is $6/mo, so the v5 shape costs 2.8 times more.

The gap widens because v5 has no monthly cap. Bundled plans stop charging at 672 hours and the remaining hours of a 31-day month are free. v5 Droplets are billed for actual hours used, which DigitalOcean's docs describe as uncapped at 672 hours, and the company recommends spend alerts instead.

Bigger v5 shapes show the same pattern. DigitalOcean's own example, s5-8vcpu-16gb-30gb, works out to about $0.1953/hr, or roughly $143 over 730 hours. For comparison, the bundled General Purpose 16 GiB plan with 4 vCPUs is $126/mo. Public IPv4 addresses on v5 Droplets are also billed as a separate line item; the introductory price is $0.00 but the docs say it is subject to change.

The practical read: v5 is a flexibility product, not a discount. If your workload fits a bundled shape, the bundled plan is the cheaper buy. v5 earns its premium when you need an odd memory-to-vCPU ratio, such as 16 GiB on 2 vCPUs, which no bundled plan offers at that price point.

The charges that are missing from the plan price

Three line items regularly surprise new accounts, and none of them appear in the Droplet table.

Powered-off Droplets still bill. The billing documentation states that bundled CPU Droplets and GPU Droplets keep billing while powered off because the resources stay reserved on the hypervisor. Destroying the Droplet is the only way to end the charge, and a Droplet destroyed inside 60 seconds still pays the minimum.
Bandwidth overage costs $0.01 per GiB. Each Droplet includes outbound transfer (500 GiB on the $4 plan, rising to 6,000 GiB at $96). Usage is pooled across the whole team, inbound traffic is free, and unused allowance does not roll into the next month.
Backups and snapshots are separate. Percentage-based backups add 20% for weekly or 30% for daily copies of the Droplet price. A usage-based backup plan starts at $0.01 per GiB per month. Snapshots are $0.06 per GB per month.

On a $6 Droplet, daily backups plus 25 GB of snapshots turn a $6 bill into roughly $9.30 before you have run anything.

DigitalOcean GPU Droplet pricing

GPU Droplets are a different catalog, and the per-hour rates are quoted per GPU rather than per machine. On-demand prices listed in the docs on 4 November 2026:

NVIDIA RTX 4000: $0.76/hr. L40s and RTX 6000: $1.57/hr.
AMD MI300X: $2.59/hr. AMD MI325X: $3.80/hr.
NVIDIA H100: $4.41/hr. H200: $4.47/hr.
8x variants scale up, for example 8x H200 at $35.76/hr.

DigitalOcean also advertises GPU Droplets from $1.91 per GPU hour on a multi-month contractual commitment, which is worth pricing against the on-demand rate if you are running inference continuously rather than in bursts. Spot GPU Droplets sit in public preview at rates that change daily and are always at or below on-demand: an air-cooled B300 lists at $6.17/hr and an MI355X at $4.50/hr. DigitalOcean can reclaim a spot instance with two hours' notice.

The billing rule is the same as CPU: per second with a 60-second minimum, and a powered-off GPU Droplet keeps billing until destroyed. Newer accounts may also see a mid-cycle charge when a GPU Droplet is created, which the docs describe as an anti-abuse measure that does not change the total.

Agent Droplets: what the $50 plan includes

Agent Droplets is DigitalOcean's 2026 attempt to sell agent infrastructure as a subscription instead of raw servers. The pricing page lists three tiers: a free trial with $5 of credit for new customers, Pro at $50/mo and Team at $200/mo.

Pro takes 15% off agent usage and Team takes 20%. The discount applies to DigitalOcean-hosted inference (the page names Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3), the dedicated microVMs your agents run in, memory, session storage and access to the tool gateway. Both paid tiers include unlimited agents and unlimited seats, and there are no per-seat charges.

Two limits matter. The discount only covers models DigitalOcean hosts, so Claude and GPT usage is billed pay-as-you-go at list price. And when a plan's credit runs out, usage continues at list price rather than pausing. If you would rather not commit monthly, DigitalOcean lets you fund a separate inference and agents balance and draw it down at list price.

Bundled, v5, or a cheaper VPS elsewhere?

Match the billing model to the workload instead of chasing the headline number.

Steady small workloads: take the bundled plan. A $6 Droplet with 1 GiB, 1 vCPU and 1,000 GiB of transfer is the cheapest shape DigitalOcean sells for a blog, a small API or a VPN, and the 672-hour cap protects you in long months.
Custom resource ratios: v5 is the only way to buy, say, 16 GiB with 2 vCPUs. Budget for the uncapped hours and set spend alerts.
Short-lived jobs: per-second billing with a 60-second minimum is genuinely useful for builds and test runs, but remember that a destroyed Droplet is the only one that stops billing.
Anything GPU: compare the on-demand rate against spot and against contract pricing before committing, because the spread between $0.76 and $4.47 per hour is the whole budget.

DigitalOcean is not the cheapest per gigabyte of RAM. Buyers comparing entry plans should price Hetzner, Vultr and Linode on the same vCPU and RAM shape before signing up, and should treat the transfer allowance as part of the price, because $0.01 per GiB overage adds up on media or backup traffic. Our cheap VPS breakdown and best cheap VPS guide cover those alternatives, and the GPU cloud comparison covers the inference side.

At a glance

Memory	vCPU	Transfer	SSD	$/hr	$/mo
512 MiB	1 vCPU	500 GiB	10 GiB	$0.00595	$4
1 GiB	1 vCPU	1,000 GiB	25 GiB	$0.00893	$6
2 GiB	1 vCPU	2,000 GiB	50 GiB	$0.01786	$12
2 GiB	2 vCPUs	3,000 GiB	60 GiB	$0.02679	$18
4 GiB	2 vCPUs	4,000 GiB	80 GiB	$0.03571	$24
8 GiB	4 vCPUs	5,000 GiB	160 GiB	$0.07143	$48
16 GiB	8 vCPUs	6,000 GiB	320 GiB	$0.14286	$96

DigitalOcean Basic Droplet prices, verified 4 November 2026

FAQ

Does DigitalOcean charge for Droplets that are powered off?

Yes. DigitalOcean's billing docs say bundled CPU Droplets and GPU Droplets keep billing while powered off because the resources remain reserved, and only destroying the Droplet ends the charge.

Is there a free DigitalOcean tier?

The pricing page lists no permanent free Droplet tier. DigitalOcean says it often provides promotional credits for new users, and the Agent Droplets page offers new customers $5 of credit on the free trial.

What happens if I exceed my Droplet's bandwidth allowance?

Extra outbound transfer is billed at $0.01 per GiB. Allowances pool across all Droplets in a team, inbound traffic is free, and unused transfer does not roll over to the next month.