DigitalOcean Droplet Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay
DigitalOcean Droplet pricing starts at $4.00 a month for a Basic Droplet with 512 MiB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10 GiB SSD and 500 GiB of outbound transfer, and tops out at $96.00 a month for the 8 vCPU, 16 GiB tier. That is compute plus its transfer allowance only. Backups are a percentage of the Droplet price (20% weekly or 30% daily), snapshots cost $0.06/GB per month, and transfer past the allowance costs $0.01 per GiB, per DigitalOcean's pricing pages read 2026-11-01.
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The Basic Droplet Price Ladder
| Tier | RAM | vCPU | SSD | Transfer included | Monthly | Hourly |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 512 MiB | 1 | 10 GiB | 500 GiB | $4.00 | $0.00595 |
| 2 | 1 GiB | 1 | 25 GiB | 1,000 GiB | $6.00 | $0.00893 |
| 3 | 2 GiB | 1 | 50 GiB | 2,000 GiB | $12.00 | $0.01786 |
| 4 | 2 GiB | 2 | 60 GiB | 3,000 GiB | $18.00 | $0.02679 |
| 5 | 4 GiB | 2 | 80 GiB | 4,000 GiB | $24.00 | $0.03571 |
| 6 | 8 GiB | 4 | 160 GiB | 5,000 GiB | $48.00 | $0.07143 |
| 7 | 16 GiB | 8 | 320 GiB | 6,000 GiB | $96.00 | $0.14286 |
Monthly price by Basic Droplet tier (USD)
Source: DigitalOcean Droplet pricing page, read 2026-11-01.
The tier 3 to tier 4 step ($12.00 to $18.00) adds a second vCPU, 10 GiB of SSD and 1,000 GiB of transfer while RAM stays at 2 GiB. Pay for it only if the bottleneck is CPU or transfer, not memory.
Billing: Per-Second Since January 2026
DigitalOcean says Droplets move to per-second billing effective January 1, 2026, with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher. That helps short-lived jobs such as batch runs and test environments. For a Droplet that runs all month, you pay the monthly price shown on the ladder.
Backups: A Percentage of the Droplet Price
Percentage-based backups are set at 20% (weekly) or 30% (daily) of Droplet cost. Usage-based backup plans start at $0.01/GiB per month, with frequencies as often as every 4 hours and retention from 3 days to 6 months. The percentage option makes the cost scale with the tier.
| Droplet | Monthly price | With weekly backups (20%) | With daily backups (30%) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 (512 MiB) | $4.00 | $4.80 | $5.20 |
| Tier 3 (2 GiB, 1 vCPU) | $12.00 | $14.40 | $15.60 |
| Tier 7 (16 GiB, 8 vCPUs) | $96.00 | $115.20 | $124.80 |
Snapshots
Manual Droplet snapshots cost $0.06/GB per month for as long as the image is kept. A snapshot before a risky deploy is cheap if you delete it once the release is stable.
Data Transfer and Overage
DigitalOcean says Droplets include free outbound data transfer starting at 500 GiB a month, ingress is free, and data transfer within and across VPCs in a data center is free. Public internet egress past the allowance costs $0.01 per GiB, so 100 GiB over the allowance adds $1 and 1,000 GiB over adds $10. Transfer between data centers over a private VPC is also $0.01 per GiB past the allowance.
Budget check: On the entry tier the allowance is 500 GiB; the next tier up ($6.00) doubles it to 1,000 GiB. For a media-heavy site, compare the overage cost against the price of the next tier before buying.
What Else Is Included
The pricing page lists free Reserved IPs when assigned to a Droplet, and the Droplets card on the main pricing page also starts at $4/month. Other Droplet families (CPU-Optimized, General Purpose, Memory-Optimized, Storage-Optimized) are priced separately; CPU-Optimized Droplets provide a 2:1 ratio of memory to CPU. This page prices Basic Regular Droplets only.
What This Page Does Not Price
It does not price managed databases, Kubernetes, load balancers or the other families, and it states no uptime or speed measurement. Treat the totals as compute plus backups plus snapshots plus overage.
How DigitalOcean Compares
For a head-to-head see DigitalOcean vs. Vultr or DigitalOcean vs. Cloudways, and the broader DigitalOcean review on HostingDive. Price pages for other providers: hostinger vps pricing, aws lightsail pricing and linode pricing. The real cost of cloud VPS hosting page covers the pattern across all providers, and the cloud VPS hosting hub routes you by use case.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does a DigitalOcean Droplet cost?
Basic Droplets run from $4.00 to $96.00 a month on the Regular CPU ladder: $4.00, $6.00, $12.00, $18.00, $24.00, $48.00 and $96.00.
Is DigitalOcean billed hourly or monthly?
DigitalOcean lists both an hourly rate and a monthly price, and says Droplets move to per-second billing effective January 1, 2026, with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01.
How much do DigitalOcean backups cost?
Percentage-based backups are 20% of the Droplet price weekly or 30% daily. Usage-based backups start at $0.01/GiB per month.
What does transfer overage cost?
Public internet egress past the included allowance is $0.01 per GiB. The allowance starts at 500 GiB a month.
How much does a DigitalOcean snapshot cost?
$0.06/GB per month.
Is a DigitalOcean Droplet a VPS?
A Droplet is DigitalOcean's cloud virtual machine, the product most buyers compare with a VPS.