DigitalOcean Kubernetes pricing

Managed Kubernetes with no charge for the control plane on the standard tier, so you pay only for worker nodes — unlike the hyperscalers, which bill roughly $70 per month per cluster.

List prices checked

By DigitalOcean · Cloud compute & VPS

Rate card

What DigitalOcean charges, by billing axis.

AxisPriceApplies to
Entry plan$12.00/moCheapest paid plan or typical entry configuration
Data transfer out$0.010/GBStandard tier, cheapest common region
Free tierYesControl plane free on the standard tier

Source: DigitalOcean pricing (May 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 Kubernetes 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.

$13/mo

  • 1 × entry plan at $12/month (this provider sells flat-rate plans, not vCPU-hours)$12
  • 100 GB at $0.01/GB$1.00

Growing SaaS

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

$34/mo

  • 2 × entry plan at $12/month (this provider sells flat-rate plans, not vCPU-hours)$24
  • 1 TB at $0.01/GB$10

Media-heavy site

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

$112/mo

  • 1 × entry plan at $12/month (this provider sells flat-rate plans, not vCPU-hours)$12
  • 10 TB at $0.01/GB$100

DigitalOcean Kubernetes vs the alternatives

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

ServicePer vCPU-hrvs DigitalOcean KubernetesCompare
Contabo VPS——Head to head
AWS Lightsail——Head to head
OVHcloud VPS——Head to head
IONOS Cloud Servers——Head to head
Azure Virtual Machines$0.052—Head to head
Google Compute Engine$0.048—Head to head

Questions about pricing

How much does DigitalOcean Kubernetes cost in 2026?
DigitalOcean Kubernetes charges $12.00 per month for the entry plan, per DigitalOcean's published pricing page. There is also a free tier: Control plane free on the standard tier. The tables above break the rate card down by axis and model it against three concrete workloads.
Does DigitalOcean Kubernetes have a free tier?
Yes — Control plane free on the standard tier. Check whether it is permanent or a trial before you build a budget around it; the two are often presented identically.
What does DigitalOcean Kubernetes charge for egress?
$0.010 per GB. Egress is where providers in this category differ most, so it is worth checking against the alternatives before committing.
Are these DigitalOcean Kubernetes 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.

Keep comparing