DigitalOcean Pricing 2026: Droplets, Bandwidth, Per-Second Billing

DigitalOcean costs $4/mo for its smallest Droplet in 2026: 1 vCPU, 512 MiB of memory, 10 GiB of SSD and 500 GiB of outbound transfer. A 1 GiB Droplet is $6/mo and a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB Droplet $24/mo. Since 1 January 2026, Droplets bill per second with a 60-second minimum, and fixed plans never charge more than their monthly price.

Every figure here was read on DigitalOcean's Droplet pricing page and its billing documentation on October 18, 2026. Our view: the Basic Droplets are still the right default for most apps, because the monthly cap makes them predictable, while the newer v5 Droplets cost more for a server that stays on. The product itself is covered in the DigitalOcean review; this page is about the invoice.

Droplet type	Starts at	Entry size	Best for
Basic, Regular CPU	$4/mo	1 vCPU, 512 MiB, 10 GiB SSD, 500 GiB transfer	Side projects, small web apps, bursty workloads
Basic, Premium Intel or AMD	$7/mo	1 vCPU, 1 GiB, 25 GiB SSD, 1,000 GiB transfer	Small apps that want a premium CPU tier
CPU-Optimized	$42/mo	2 vCPU, 4 GiB, 25 GiB SSD	CI builds, encoding, steady CPU-bound jobs
General Purpose	$63/mo	2 vCPU, 8 GiB, 25 GiB SSD	Production apps that need dedicated CPU
Memory-Optimized	$84/mo	2 vCPU, 16 GiB, 50 GiB SSD	Caches, in-memory databases
Storage-Optimized	$131/mo	2 vCPU, 16 GiB, 300 GiB SSD	Large local datasets, NoSQL nodes
v5, Shared CPU	$0.024/hr	1 vCPU, 1 GB	Configurable shared compute, billed by the hour with no cap

Toolradar data: DigitalOcean's entry plan ranks #17 of 118 (joint) for price among the Hosting & Deployment tools with a verified entry price on Toolradar, the software directory we run, where the median entry plan is $12/mo, as of October 2026. Its record is DigitalOcean on Toolradar.

How does DigitalOcean billing work?

DigitalOcean bills Droplets by the second, with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher. Its pricing FAQ says both fixed-size Droplets (which it calls Bundled Plans) and v5 Droplets follow that rule. The difference is the ceiling. Bundled Plan Droplets stop accruing at 672 hours, or 28 days, so a Droplet that runs all month pays exactly its listed price; v5 Droplets bill every hour used and are not capped.

The cap is why the listed prices hold. The 1 GiB Droplet bills $0.00893 an hour, and 672 hours of that equals its monthly price to the cent. In a 31-day month the last three days are free, which makes Bundled Plans the safer choice for anything always on.

The catch for short jobs is the one-cent floor. On the 1 GiB Droplet, a cent buys about 67 minutes, so any run shorter than that bills the minimum. On the 2 vCPU, 4 GiB Droplet at $0.03571 an hour, the floor covers about 17 minutes. A CI runner that lives for two minutes therefore costs at least a cent per job, a rounding error for a few hundred runs and a visible line only at thousands of runs a month.

Powering off does not stop the meter. DigitalOcean's Droplet pricing documentation says powered-off Bundled Plan Droplets are still billed, because their resources stay reserved on the hypervisor. To stop paying, you snapshot the Droplet and destroy it. Snapshots cost $0.06 per GB a month, so a 25 GB snapshot costs $1.50 a month to keep.

What do Basic Droplets cost?

Basic Droplets run on shared CPU, which DigitalOcean positions for bursty apps that do not keep a core busy. They are the plans most developers mean when they say DigitalOcean is cheap.

Basic Regular	Monthly	Hourly	Disk	Transfer included
1 vCPU, 512 MiB	$4	$0.00595	10 GiB	500 GiB
1 vCPU, 1 GiB	$6	$0.00893	25 GiB	1,000 GiB
1 vCPU, 2 GiB	$12	$0.01786	50 GiB	2,000 GiB
2 vCPU, 2 GiB	$18	$0.02679	60 GiB	3,000 GiB
2 vCPU, 4 GiB	$24	$0.03571	80 GiB	4,000 GiB
4 vCPU, 8 GiB	$48	$0.07143	160 GiB	5,000 GiB
8 vCPU, 16 GiB	$96	$0.14286	320 GiB	6,000 GiB

The Premium Intel and Premium AMD versions cost more at the same memory: 1 GiB is $7, 2 GiB is $14, and 2 vCPU with 4 GiB is $28, each a few dollars above the Regular row. The premium tier is a choice of CPU for apps that care about consistent speed, but the Regular row is enough for most staging servers, bots and low-traffic sites.

The 512 MiB plan deserves a caution. It fits a static site or a small bot, but half a gigabyte leaves little room for an app server and a database on the same machine, which is why most production apps start at the 1 or 2 GiB rows.

What do the dedicated-CPU Droplets cost?

The other Bundled Plan families are sized for steady work rather than bursts, and they start well above the Basic range. At 4 GiB, CPU-Optimized costs $42, well above the Basic Droplet with the same memory, and that premium buys steady performance under load rather than more capacity.

• CPU-Optimized starts at $42/mo for 2 vCPU and 4 GiB, with 4 vCPU and 8 GiB at $84. It suits builds and media jobs that peg the CPU for hours.
• General Purpose starts at $63/mo for 2 vCPU and 8 GiB, and $126 for 4 vCPU and 16 GiB. It is the balanced choice for production APIs that cannot share a core.
• Memory-Optimized starts at $84/mo for 2 vCPU and 16 GiB, and $168 for 4 vCPU and 32 GiB.
• Storage-Optimized starts at $131/mo for 2 vCPU, 16 GiB and 300 GiB of local SSD.

Each family also sells larger-disk variants of the same CPU and memory at a higher price. Compare them with Block Storage Volumes, priced below, before paying for local disk you may not need.

What are v5 Droplets, and when are they worth it?

v5 Droplets are DigitalOcean's configurable line on 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors: you pick vCPU, memory and boot disk separately and pay an hourly rate for each. The pricing documentation lists shared vCPU at $0.0158219 per vCPU an hour, dedicated General Purpose vCPU at $0.028, memory at $0.0040411 per GiB an hour and boot disk at $0.000137 per GiB an hour.

For a server that never sleeps, v5 costs more. A shared v5 Droplet with 1 vCPU, 1 GB and 30 GB of disk runs $0.024 an hour, which comes to $17.84 over a 744-hour month, about three times the capped Basic Droplet with similar memory. A General Purpose v5 with 2 vCPU, 8 GB and 50 GB comes to $70.81 over the same month, against $63 for the Bundled Plan with 25 GiB of disk.

v5 earns its place when the fixed ratios do not fit: a process that needs 3 vCPU with little memory, or a large Droplet up to 64 vCPU and 512 GB of RAM. DigitalOcean also claims up to 30 percent higher per-core performance than its previous Droplets, from its own internal testing. Public IPv4 on v5 is a separate line item, priced at $0.00 an hour for now, which DigitalOcean says may change.

How much bandwidth is included, and what does overage cost?

Transfer is the line most likely to surprise a growing app. Every Droplet includes outbound transfer, from 500 GiB a month on the smallest plan up to several TiB on larger ones, and inbound traffic is free. DigitalOcean's bandwidth billing page sets overage at $0.01 per GiB.

The allowance is pooled across your team, not held per Droplet. Each Droplet adds its transfer to a shared pool for the time it exists, accruing 1/2,419,200 of its allowance per second (the seconds in 28 days). Traffic between Droplets over the private VPC network is free, and traffic dropped by a DigitalOcean firewall is not billed.

Pooling creates a counterintuitive trick: adding a small Droplet can lower the bill. One 1 GiB Droplet that sends 3,000 GiB pays for 2,000 GiB of overage, while a second one adds 1,000 GiB to the pool and costs less than the overage it removes. The priced version is in the bills below.

Five DigitalOcean bills, priced

These scenarios use list prices from the pages above, for a 30-day month. They are our arithmetic, not quotes, and they exclude tax.

Scenario	What you run	Monthly bill
Side project	512 MiB Basic Droplet plus weekly backups at 20% of Droplet cost ($0.80)	$4.80
Small production app	2 vCPU, 4 GiB Basic Droplet, daily backups at 30% ($7.20), 100 GiB Volume ($10)	$41.20
Traffic-heavy, one Droplet	1 GiB Basic sending 3,000 GiB: 2,000 GiB over at the overage rate ($20)	$26
Traffic-heavy, two Droplets	Two 1 GiB Basic ($12) sending 3,000 GiB: 1,000 GiB over ($10)	$22
CI runner, 100 hours	2 vCPU, 4 GiB Basic at $0.03571 an hour, destroyed between runs	$3.57

The CI row shows what per-second billing changed: a runner created for each batch and destroyed afterward pays for about 100 hours, while the same Droplet left on pays its full monthly price. The traffic rows show the pooling effect, where a second small server cuts the bill by $4 and adds a failover node.

The production row is where budgets slip. Backups add 30 percent to the Droplet price on a daily schedule, so the 4 GiB server is really $31.20 before you add storage. Usage-based backup plans start at a cent per GiB a month and can be cheaper for Droplets with little data.

Costs outside the Droplet price

• Unassigned reserved IPs. A reserved IPv4 address is free while attached to a Droplet and $5 a month when it is not, per DigitalOcean's reserved IP pricing. Reserved IPv6 is free either way.
• Snapshots of destroyed Droplets. Snapshots keep billing per GB until you delete them, long after the Droplet is gone.
• Backups. Weekly backups add 20 percent and daily backups 30 percent of the Droplet's cost.
• Block storage. Volumes bill separately from the Droplet's own disk, at $10 a month for 100 GiB.
• Free credit. DigitalOcean says it often gives new users promotional credit, but its pricing page names no amount, so check the sign-up offer before you plan around it.

How does DigitalOcean compare with Akamai's Linode?

At the common sizes the two list the same monthly prices, and the differences sit at the edges. Akamai's shared CPU pricing lists a 1 GB Nanode at $5/mo, a dollar under DigitalOcean's 1 GiB Droplet, and 2 GB, 4 GB and 8 GB plans at $12, $24 and $48, matching DigitalOcean's Basic rows.

Overage is where Akamai pulls ahead for traffic-heavy apps: it lists egress overage at $0.005 per GB, half DigitalOcean's rate. The single-Droplet traffic scenario above would cost $15 on a Nanode, with half the overage charge, against $26 on DigitalOcean. Akamai also keeps billing an instance that is powered off until you remove it, the same rule DigitalOcean applies.

For servers in Europe, Hetzner is the other price to check; the size-by-size comparison is in DigitalOcean vs Hetzner and the Hetzner review. The best cheap VPS list ranks the low-cost field, best VPS hosting for developers covers fit beyond price, and the profiles for Linode and Hetzner sit on Toolradar.

If you would rather not manage a server at all, the managed platforms bill differently: see Render pricing, Railway pricing and the Heroku migration guide. Storage-heavy apps should also read object storage pricing compared, and the cloud free tiers comparison covers what you can run for nothing.

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Frequently asked questions

How much does DigitalOcean cost per month?

The smallest Basic Droplet costs $4 a month for 1 vCPU, 512 MiB and 10 GiB of disk. A 1 GiB Droplet is $6 a month and a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB Droplet is $24. Dedicated-CPU Droplets start at $42 on CPU-Optimized and $63 on General Purpose.

Does DigitalOcean bill by the hour or by the second?

By the second, since 1 January 2026, with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or one cent, whichever is higher. Fixed-size Droplets stop accruing at 672 hours a month, so an always-on Droplet pays its listed monthly price. v5 Droplets bill by the hour used with no cap.

Am I charged for a powered-off Droplet?

Yes. DigitalOcean bills powered-off Bundled Plan Droplets because their resources stay reserved. To stop the charge, take a snapshot and destroy the Droplet; the snapshot then costs $0.06 per GB a month.

What does DigitalOcean charge for bandwidth overage?

Outbound transfer beyond your allowance costs $0.01 per GiB. The allowance is pooled across all Droplets on your team, inbound traffic is free, and traffic over the private VPC network does not count.

Is DigitalOcean cheaper than Linode?

At 2 GB, 4 GB and 8 GB the monthly prices match. Linode's 1 GB Nanode is a dollar cheaper, and Akamai's $0.005 per GB egress overage is half DigitalOcean's rate, so Linode costs less for apps that exceed their transfer allowance.

Does DigitalOcean have a free tier?

There is no free Droplet. DigitalOcean says it often offers promotional credit to new users but does not publish the amount on its Droplet pricing page, so check the current sign-up offer.

How we priced this

Every price on this page was read on October 18, 2026 on DigitalOcean's Droplet pricing page, Volumes pricing page, Droplet pricing documentation, bandwidth billing page and reserved IP pricing, and on Akamai's shared CPU pricing. The five bills and the per-minute floors are our arithmetic on those list prices. The Toolradar figure comes from its DigitalOcean record, October 2026. This page reads published prices; it does not benchmark the servers. Prices change, so recheck the pricing page before you commit.

Cite this: Devshot, "DigitalOcean Pricing 2026: Droplets, Bandwidth, Per-Second Billing", October 2026.

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