DigitalOcean Droplets pricing

Predictable flat-rate virtual machines with pooled account-level bandwidth. Costs more per vCPU than the European budget hosts and less than any hyperscaler.

List prices checked

By DigitalOcean · Cloud compute & VPS

Rate card

What DigitalOcean charges, by billing axis.

AxisPriceApplies to
Entry plan$4.00/moCheapest paid plan or typical entry configuration
Compute$0.0060/vCPU-hrOn-demand, cheapest general-purpose region
Data transfer out$0.010/GB500 GB included, then metered
Free tierYes500 GB to 1 TB of pooled egress per Droplet

Source: DigitalOcean pricing (August 2026). Published list prices only — committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges are not included. Not yet independently re-checked against the vendor’s page.

Plans

Every DigitalOcean Droplets tier DigitalOcean lists, with the cost per GB of RAM worked out so the lineup can be compared against itself.

PlanvCPURAMStorageTransferMonthlyPer GB RAM
s-1vcpu-512mb-10gb10.5 GB10 GB0.5 TB$4.00$8.00
s-1vcpu-1gb11 GB25 GB1 TB$6.00$6.00
s-1vcpu-2gb12 GB50 GB2 TB$12$6.00
s-2vcpu-2gb22 GB60 GB3 TB$18$9.00
s-2vcpu-4gb24 GB80 GB4 TB$24$6.00
s-4vcpu-8gb48 GB160 GB5 TB$48$6.00

Source: DigitalOcean pricing (August 2026). Published list prices only — committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges are not included. Not yet independently re-checked against the vendor’s page.

What it costs per month

DigitalOcean Droplets billed against three workload profiles, using the rates above. Every line shows its arithmetic.

Side project

A personal site or small app with modest traffic, a few gigabytes of assets, and one small always-on process.

$4.34/mo

  • 730 vCPU-hours at $0.00595/hour$4.34
  • 100 GB used, 500 GB included, 0 GB billable at $0.01/GB$0

Growing SaaS

A funded product serving a few thousand daily users, with an image-heavy frontend and two application servers.

$14/mo

  • 1,460 vCPU-hours at $0.00595/hour$8.69
  • 1 TB used, 500 GB included, 500 GB billable at $0.01/GB$5.00

Media-heavy site

A publisher or video product where delivery dominates the bill and compute is almost an afterthought.

$99/mo

  • 730 vCPU-hours at $0.00595/hour$4.34
  • 10 TB used, 500 GB included, 9.5 TB billable at $0.01/GB$95

DigitalOcean Droplets vs the alternatives

The closest compute providers on price, with the difference on cloud compute & vps's headline axis.

ServicePer vCPU-hrvs DigitalOcean DropletsCompare
Scaleway Instances$0.00601× dearerHead to head
Hetzner Cloud$0.00521.1× cheaperHead to head
UpCloud$0.00741.2× dearerHead to head
Linode (Akamai Cloud)$0.00751.3× dearerHead to head
Vultr Cloud Compute$0.00401.5× cheaperHead to head
Oracle Cloud Compute$0.0101.7× dearerHead to head

Questions about pricing

How much does DigitalOcean Droplets cost in 2026?
DigitalOcean Droplets charges $4.00 per month for the entry plan, per DigitalOcean's published pricing page. There is also a free tier: 500 GB to 1 TB of pooled egress per Droplet. The tables above break the rate card down by axis and model it against three concrete workloads.
Does DigitalOcean Droplets have a free tier?
Yes — 500 GB to 1 TB of pooled egress per Droplet. Check whether it is permanent or a trial before you build a budget around it; the two are often presented identically.
What does DigitalOcean Droplets charge for egress?
$0.010 per GB, after 500 GB included in the plan. Egress is where providers in this category differ most, so it is worth checking against the alternatives before committing.
Are these DigitalOcean Droplets prices current?
They were checked against DigitalOcean's official pricing page and stamped with that date, which is shown at the top of this page and next to every table. Vendors change list prices without notice — the source link is there so you can confirm before you commit.

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