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DigitalOcean Pricing: VPS, GPU, Storage and More (2026)

DigitalOcean pricing for Droplets, backups, bandwidth, storage, databases and support, with current 2026 billing checks and official source links.

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On this page
  1. Overview
  2. Quick Cost Summary
  3. Droplets (Virtual Machines)
  4. Basic Droplets
  5. CPU-Optimized Droplets
  6. General Purpose Droplets
  7. Memory-Optimized Droplets
  8. Storage-Optimized Droplets
  9. Managed Databases
  10. Cost Checks
  11. Kubernetes
  12. Node Pools
  13. Storage Solutions
  14. GPU Droplets
  15. Networking
  16. Load Balancers
  17. Cloud Firewalls
  18. Additional Services
  19. Container Registry
  20. Functions (Serverless)
  21. App Platform
  22. Bandwidth Pricing
  23. Support Plans
  24. Region And Tax Notes
  25. Summary
  26. Key Advantages
  27. Cost Checks Before You Buy
  28. Best For
  29. Related VPS Buying Guides

Overview

Last reviewed: July 6, 2026. Prices can change by region, plan family, and promotion, so verify against DigitalOcean before purchasing.

DigitalOcean is usually easier to estimate than AWS or Google Cloud, but the final bill is still affected by backups, snapshots, bandwidth overage, load balancers, managed databases, storage, GPU capacity, and support plans. This page focuses on the costs a VPS buyer is most likely to miss.

Official references used for this review:

digitalocean

Quick Cost Summary

Item Current practical takeaway
Cheapest Droplet Basic Droplets start at $4/month for 512 MiB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10 GiB SSD, and 500 GiB transfer.
Billing model CPU Droplets bill per second with a 60-second or $0.01 minimum. Powered-off Droplets still bill until destroyed.
Bandwidth Droplet outbound transfer is pooled at the team level. Extra Droplet outbound transfer is $0.01/GiB and inbound transfer is free.
Backups Weekly backups are 20% of Droplet cost; daily backups are 30%. Usage-based backup plans start at $0.01/GiB-month.
Snapshots Droplet snapshots are billed separately at $0.06/GB-month.
Kubernetes The DOKS control plane is free, but worker nodes, load balancers, storage, and bandwidth still bill.

Droplets (Virtual Machines)

Basic Droplets

Basic Droplets are the lowest-cost VM line and work best for bursty sites, development environments, small services, and workloads that do not need dedicated CPU threads.

Plan vCPU RAM SSD Transfer Price/Month
s-1vcpu-512mb 1 512 MiB 10 GiB 500 GiB $4
s-1vcpu-1gb 1 1 GiB 25 GiB 1,000 GiB $6
s-1vcpu-2gb 1 2 GiB 50 GiB 2,000 GiB $12
s-2vcpu-2gb 2 2 GiB 60 GiB 3,000 GiB $18
s-2vcpu-4gb 2 4 GiB 80 GiB 4,000 GiB $24
s-4vcpu-8gb 4 8 GiB 160 GiB 5,000 GiB $48
s-8vcpu-16gb 8 16 GiB 320 GiB 6,000 GiB $96

CPU-Optimized Droplets

CPU-Optimized Droplets use dedicated vCPUs and fit workloads that need predictable CPU performance, such as media processing, analytics, game servers, and busy application servers.

Plan vCPU RAM SSD Transfer Price/Month
c-2 2 4 GiB 25 GiB 4,000 GiB $42
c-4 4 8 GiB 50 GiB 5,000 GiB $84
c-8 8 16 GiB 100 GiB 6,000 GiB $168
c-16 16 32 GiB 200 GiB 7,000 GiB $336
c-32 32 64 GiB 400 GiB 9,000 GiB $672
c-48 48 96 GiB 600 GiB 11,000 GiB $1,008

General Purpose Droplets

General Purpose Droplets balance dedicated CPU and memory for production applications that need steadier resources than Basic Droplets.

Plan vCPU RAM SSD Transfer Price/Month
g-2vcpu-8gb 2 8 GiB 25 GiB 4,000 GiB $63
g-4vcpu-16gb 4 16 GiB 50 GiB 5,000 GiB $126
g-8vcpu-32gb 8 32 GiB 100 GiB 6,000 GiB $252
g-16vcpu-64gb 16 64 GiB 200 GiB 7,000 GiB $504
g-32vcpu-128gb 32 128 GiB 400 GiB 8,000 GiB $1,008
g-40vcpu-160gb 40 160 GiB 500 GiB 9,000 GiB $1,260

Memory-Optimized Droplets

Memory-Optimized Droplets provide 8 GiB RAM per vCPU and are useful for memory-heavy services, caches, analytics, and databases where swapping would hurt performance.

Plan vCPU RAM NVMe SSD Transfer Price/Month
m-2vcpu-16gb 2 16 GiB 50 GiB 4,000 GiB $84
m-4vcpu-32gb 4 32 GiB 100 GiB 6,000 GiB $168
m-8vcpu-64gb 8 64 GiB 200 GiB 7,000 GiB $336
m-16vcpu-128gb 16 128 GiB 400 GiB 8,000 GiB $672
m-24vcpu-192gb 24 192 GiB 600 GiB 9,000 GiB $1,008
m-32vcpu-256gb 32 256 GiB 800 GiB 10,000 GiB $1,344

Storage-Optimized Droplets

Storage-Optimized Droplets use larger NVMe disks and are intended for workloads where local disk capacity and I/O matter more than the lowest monthly price.

Plan vCPU RAM NVMe SSD Transfer Price/Month
so-2vcpu-16gb 2 16 GiB 300 GiB 4,000 GiB $131
so-4vcpu-32gb 4 32 GiB 600 GiB 6,000 GiB $262
so-8vcpu-64gb 8 64 GiB 1,170 GiB 7,000 GiB $524
so-16vcpu-128gb 16 128 GiB 2,340 GiB 8,000 GiB $1,048
so-24vcpu-192gb 24 192 GiB 3,520 GiB 9,000 GiB $1,572
so-32vcpu-256gb 32 256 GiB 4,690 GiB 10,000 GiB $2,096

Managed Databases

Managed Databases include several engines, and exact totals change with engine, CPU family, node count, and storage range. Start with the official engine table and then add storage growth or extra nodes.

Engine Entry configuration Entry storage Current starting price
MySQL / PostgreSQL 1 GiB RAM, 1 vCPU 10-30 GiB $15.15/month
MongoDB 1 GiB RAM, 1 vCPU 15-25 GiB $15.23/month
Valkey / Redis-compatible caching 1 GiB RAM, 1 vCPU 10 GiB $15/month

Cost Checks

  1. Storage is priced in ranges and increments, so growth can move a database into a higher monthly total.
  2. Extra nodes improve availability but multiply compute cost.
  3. A tiny blog or side project may be cheaper on a self-managed database unless managed failover and backups matter.

Kubernetes

DigitalOcean Kubernetes has a free control plane. You still pay for the Droplet worker nodes and related infrastructure.

Node Pools

Example worker node Typical monthly starting point
Basic 1 vCPU / 2 GiB $12/month
CPU-Optimized 2 vCPU / 4 GiB $42/month
General Purpose 2 vCPU / 8 GiB $63/month
Memory-Optimized 2 vCPU / 16 GiB $84/month
Storage-Optimized 2 vCPU / 16 GiB $131/month

Do not treat the free control plane as a free cluster. Real clusters often include several workers, load balancers, volumes, backups, and outbound bandwidth.

Storage Solutions

  • Spaces starts at $5/month and includes 250 GiB storage plus 1 TiB outbound transfer.
  • Additional Spaces storage is $0.02/GiB-month, additional transfer is $0.01/GiB, and cold storage is $0.007/GiB-month.
  • Network File Storage starts at $0.15/GiB-month for Standard and $0.30/GiB-month for High Performance, with a 50 GiB minimum.
  • Droplet snapshots are $0.06/GB-month. Review unattached volumes, file shares, snapshots, and Spaces buckets during cleanup.

GPU Droplets

GPU pricing changes more often than standard VPS pricing. Treat these figures as a current snapshot and confirm the GPU page before reserving capacity.

GPU Droplet On-demand price Notable included resources
AMD Instinct MI300X $1.99/GPU-hour 192 GB GPU memory, 240 GiB Droplet memory, 20 vCPUs
NVIDIA HGX H100 $3.39/GPU-hour 80 GB GPU memory, 240 GiB Droplet memory, 20 vCPUs
NVIDIA HGX H200 $3.44/GPU-hour 141 GB GPU memory, 240 GiB Droplet memory, 24 vCPUs
AMD Instinct MI350X $4.40/GPU-hour 288 GB GPU memory, 256 GiB Droplet memory, 24 vCPUs
NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada Generation $0.76/GPU-hour 20 GB GPU memory, 32 GiB Droplet memory, 8 vCPUs
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation $1.57/GPU-hour 48 GB GPU memory, 64 GiB Droplet memory, 8 vCPUs
NVIDIA L40S $1.57/GPU-hour 48 GB GPU memory, 64 GiB Droplet memory, 8 vCPUs

Powered-off GPU Droplets still bill because the reserved disk, CPU, RAM, IP address, and GPU capacity remain allocated. Destroy them when finished.

Networking

Load Balancers

Service Current pricing note
Regional Load Balancer Starts at $12/month.
Capacity model Start with one node and add nodes as traffic grows.
Per-node capacity Each node adds 10,000 requests per second, 10,000 simultaneous connections, and 250 SSL connections per second.

Cloud Firewalls

  • Basic cloud firewall rules are included with DigitalOcean accounts.
  • If you need advanced cloud security products, verify the separate product pricing before assuming it is included with a VPS.

Additional Services

Container Registry

  • Starter is $0/month with 1 repository and 500 MiB storage.
  • Basic is $5/month with 5 repositories and 5 GiB storage.
  • Professional is $20/month with unlimited repositories and 100 GiB storage.
  • Storage overage on paid plans is $0.02/GiB.

Functions (Serverless)

  • 90,000 GiB-seconds of compute are free each month per account.
  • Additional usage is $0.0000185 per GiB-second.
  • Function runtime uses a 100 ms minimum per invocation.
  • The free allowance is pooled at the account or team level and does not roll over.

App Platform

  • Static sites have a free tier for up to 3 apps.
  • Each free static app includes 1 GiB outbound transfer per month.
  • Paid App Platform containers start at $5/month.
  • Additional App Platform outbound transfer is $0.02/GiB and is separate from Droplet transfer.

Bandwidth Pricing

  • Each Droplet plan includes outbound transfer, starting at 500 GiB/month on the smallest Basic plan.
  • Droplet transfer allowance is pooled across all Droplets in the same team and does not roll over.
  • Extra Droplet outbound transfer is $0.01/GiB; inbound transfer is free.
  • Spaces includes 1,024 GiB outbound transfer shared across buckets, then $0.01/GiB.
  • Traffic between resources in the same datacenter can be private/free, but public internet egress counts against allowances.

Support Plans

Plan Price/Month Response Time Features
Starter $0 < 24 hours Documentation and email support
Developer $24 < 8 hours Non-production development and testing
Standard $99 < 2 hours Email and live chat for production workloads
Premium $999 < 30 minutes Dedicated Slack channel, live chat, video calls, email, and extra account coverage

Region And Tax Notes

  • Product availability, regions, and datacenter names can change. Check the create-resource screen before choosing around latency or data residency.
  • Taxes are applied in some countries and can change the final invoice beyond listed infrastructure prices.
  • Marketplace 1-Click Apps are billed through the underlying compute and attached resources.

Summary

DigitalOcean is strongest when you want predictable VPS-style pricing, simple product names, and a lower learning curve than hyperscale cloud platforms. It is not automatically the cheapest choice for every workload.

Key Advantages

  1. Low entry price: Basic Droplets start at $4/month.
  2. Simple bandwidth model: Droplet overage is a flat $0.01/GiB after included allowance.
  3. Free cloud firewalls: Basic firewall rules are included.
  4. Free managed Kubernetes control plane: worker nodes and related resources still bill.
  5. Visible add-ons: backups, snapshots, load balancers, storage, and support have clear line-item pricing.

Cost Checks Before You Buy

  1. Destroy unused Droplets because powering them off does not stop compute billing.
  2. Add backup cost to the Droplet price if weekly or daily backups are enabled.
  3. Estimate outbound transfer for downloads, media, mirrors, and public APIs.
  4. Include load balancers and storage volumes when estimating production architecture.
  5. Check managed database storage ranges because storage expansion can change monthly totals.

Best For

  • Startups and SMBs looking for simple, predictable pricing
  • Developers who want to deploy applications quickly
  • Teams that value developer experience and documentation
  • Projects that need scalable infrastructure without hyperscale cloud complexity

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