digitalocean · pricing · droplets
DigitalOcean Pricing: What a Droplet Bill Really Adds Up To
By Aakash Verma ·
DigitalOcean pricing starts at $4 a month for the smallest Basic Droplet (512 MiB, 1 vCPU, 10 GiB SSD, 500 GiB of transfer) and $6 for the 1 GiB one most people actually pick. The Droplet is rarely the whole bill, though. Backups add 20% or 30% of the Droplet price, a load balancer is $12 a node, a managed database starts at $15, and a Droplet you powered off keeps billing until you destroy it.
Prices here come from the Droplet pricing page and DigitalOcean’s Droplet billing docs, both checked November 4, 2026 (the docs say they were last verified October 26).
The Basic Droplet table
These are the bundled Basic plans with regular SSDs. Each one has a monthly price, and the hourly rate is that price divided by 672.
| RAM | vCPU | SSD | Transfer | Per hour | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 512 MiB | 1 | 10 GiB | 500 GiB | $0.00595 | $4 |
| 1 GiB | 1 | 25 GiB | 1,000 GiB | $0.00893 | $6 |
| 2 GiB | 1 | 50 GiB | 2,000 GiB | $0.01786 | $12 |
| 2 GiB | 2 | 60 GiB | 3,000 GiB | $0.02679 | $18 |
| 4 GiB | 2 | 80 GiB | 4,000 GiB | $0.03571 | $24 |
| 8 GiB | 4 | 160 GiB | 5,000 GiB | $0.07143 | $48 |
| 16 GiB | 8 | 320 GiB | 6,000 GiB | $0.14286 | $96 |
If your app needs dedicated CPU, the cheapest CPU-Optimized Droplet is $42 a month (2 vCPUs, 4 GiB) and the cheapest General Purpose one is $63 (2 vCPUs, 8 GiB). That’s a big jump from $24, and plenty of small production apps never need it.
Why 672 hours matters
Since January 1, 2026, Droplets are billed per second, with a minimum of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher. Bundled plans are also capped at 672 hours a month, which is 28 days. A Droplet that exists for all 31 days of a month still costs the monthly price and not a cent more. Days 29 to 31 are free.
The cap only helps Droplets that stay up. For short-lived ones, like a test box you spin up for two hours, per-second billing is the nicer part: two hours on the $24 plan is about $0.07.
There’s a newer kind of Droplet the docs call v5, priced per resource instead of per plan: $0.0158219 an hour per shared vCPU, $0.0040411 per GiB of memory, $0.000137 per GiB of boot disk, with no monthly cap and the public IPv4 as its own line (introductory price $0.00, “subject to change”). We did the maths for the same shape as the $24 plan (2 shared vCPUs, 4 GiB, 80 GiB disk) over a 730-hour month and got about $42.90. So for a plain small server, the bundled plans are much cheaper. Look at the price DigitalOcean’s create page shows you before picking v5, and don’t pick it by accident.
The lines that grow
Powered-off Droplets still cost money. The docs are blunt about it: the compute stays reserved on the hypervisor, so you pay. Power-off is not a pause button. Snapshot it and destroy it if you want the bill to stop.
Backups are 20% of the Droplet price for weekly or 30% for daily. On a $48 Droplet that’s $9.60 or $14.40 a month. There’s also a usage-based option from $0.01 per GiB a month, with backups as often as every 4 hours. Snapshots are $0.06 per GiB a month.
Volumes (block storage) are $0.10 per GiB a month, and they bill every hour they exist, attached to a Droplet or not. A 500 GiB volume left behind after you deleted its Droplet is $50 a month for nothing.
Reserved IPs are free while assigned to a Droplet and $5 a month each when they sit unassigned. These pile up after a migration more often than you’d think.
Transfer is where DigitalOcean is kind. Every Droplet adds its allowance to a pool shared by your whole team, inbound is free, and overage is $0.01 per GiB. On AWS, data out to the internet starts at $0.09 per GB (our AWS data transfer post breaks that down), so a team pushing 5 TB over its pool pays $50 here and roughly $450 there. Unused allowance doesn’t roll over to next month.
Load balancers are $12 a month per node for HTTP and $15 for network load balancers, per the load balancer pricing docs. Managed databases start at $15 a month with daily backups included.
A small SaaS on DigitalOcean, priced
A hypothetical but very typical setup: two 4 GiB Basic Droplets behind one load balancer, weekly backups on both, a 100 GiB volume for uploads, the smallest managed Postgres, and 9,000 GiB of traffic out against an 8,000 GiB pool.
| Line | Monthly |
|---|---|
| 2 Droplets at $24 | $48.00 |
| Weekly backups (20%) | $9.60 |
| Load balancer, 1 node | $12.00 |
| Managed Postgres, smallest | $15.00 |
| Volume, 100 GiB | $10.00 |
| Transfer over the pool, 1,000 GiB | $10.00 |
| Total | $104.60 |
The DigitalOcean pricing calculator does this for your own numbers, and puts each Droplet’s v5 price next to it.
Where we usually find money
On DigitalOcean the waste is rarely the price list. It’s things left running: powered-off Droplets someone thought were paused, volumes and reserved IPs from a server that was rebuilt, daily backups on a staging box, a CPU-Optimized Droplet chosen for a launch and never sized down. Each one is small. Five of them are a real monthly line.
Some founders end up here after building an app in Lovable and wanting it off Lovable’s hosting. A $6 or $12 Droplet runs a lot of apps fine, and Lovable 2 Live moves Lovable apps to your own server if you’d rather not set it up yourself.
If you’d like someone to go through your DigitalOcean bill line by line, the free cloud cost audit costs $0. If there’s real money to save, our cloud cost optimization service is $0 up front and paid as 50% of the verified monthly saving for 6 months, and nothing if nothing is saved.
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