DigitalOcean pricing in 2026: droplets, Postgres, bandwidth

DigitalOcean bills droplets by the second and caps each one at its monthly price: $4 for the smallest shared-CPU droplet, $42 for the cheapest one with dedicated CPU, with outbound transfer pooled across your team and $0.01 a GiB past the pool. The line that changes this month is the database. From November 30, a new managed PostgreSQL cluster with a standby node has to run on Advanced Edition, so the cheapest Postgres on DigitalOcean that can fail over to a standby goes from $60.90 a month to $260.

How DigitalOcean pricing works in 2026

Since January 1, 2026, droplets bill per second, with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher. Bundled plans (every Basic, CPU-Optimized and General Purpose size below) stop billing at 672 hours (28 days), so a droplet that runs all month costs its listed price and never more. The newer v5 droplets bill for the hours they actually run with no cap, so a 31-day month costs more than a 28-day one.

A public IPv4 address comes with every bundled plan. A reserved IP you keep without attaching it to a droplet costs $5 a month.

DigitalOcean droplet pricing: which plan fits the job

DigitalOcean sells two kinds of droplet. Basic droplets share their CPU with other customers' droplets. CPU-Optimized and General Purpose droplets get dedicated vCPUs. Here are the sizes worth comparing:

Basic goes as low as $4 for 512 MiB, and that's the number you'll see quoted everywhere. DigitalOcean's own advice on choosing is the right one, though. Basic droplets are "ideal for apps that mostly run at low to medium load," and for production work "where time is of the essence or variable performance is intolerable, you should choose dedicated CPU Droplets."

So a staging box, an internal tool or a side project goes on Basic. An app your customers use all day goes on CPU-Optimized or General Purpose, and that's the price to plan around.

DigitalOcean managed PostgreSQL pricing and the November 30 change

A single-node PostgreSQL cluster starts at $15.15 a month for 1 GiB of RAM, with no standby node. For a database that fails over to a standby, Standard Edition today pairs a 2 GiB primary at $30.45 with a matching standby at the same price: $60.90 a month.

That's the part that's ending. DigitalOcean's database plan change stops new Standard Edition clusters from going above 4 GiB of RAM or adding standby or read-only nodes. It started on October 15 for accounts that had never created a PostgreSQL or MySQL cluster, and it reaches every account on November 30. A new cluster with a standby after that has to be Advanced Edition. Its smallest node has 8 GiB and 2 vCPUs and starts at $130 a month, and the standby bills at the same rate, so the pair starts at $260.

$260 does buy four times the memory: 8 GiB nodes instead of 2 GiB. What moved is the cheapest way in. If a 2 GiB Postgres with a standby was all you needed, a new one on DigitalOcean now costs $199.10 more a month.

Clusters created before the change reaches your account aren't touched. They keep their standby nodes, and you can still add more, resize, fork and restore them. If your account already has a PostgreSQL or MySQL cluster and you'll want a standby on a new one, create that cluster before November 30. If it never had one, that window closed on October 15.

Here's one production app priced both ways: two General Purpose droplets at $63, weekly backups on each at $12.60, a load balancer at $12, and Postgres with a standby. With a Standard pair, the app costs $224.10 a month. Built new after November 30, it costs $423.20, and the database goes from about a quarter of the bill to over 60% of it.

[ One app, before and after November 30 ]

DigitalOcean Kubernetes pricing, load balancers and bandwidth

On DigitalOcean Kubernetes, the standard control plane is free. A high-availability control plane is $40 a month, worker nodes are droplets from $12 a month each, and a load balancer is $12 a month per node. Each node you add gives it more capacity. A small cluster of three $12 nodes behind one load balancer comes to $48 a month, or $88 with the high-availability control plane.

Every droplet plan includes outbound transfer, and DigitalOcean pools the allowances of all the droplets on your team. A droplet adds to the pool only while it exists, so one that lives half the month brings about half its allowance. Inbound traffic is free, traffic between droplets over the VPC and to and from managed databases doesn't count, and unused transfer doesn't roll over. Past the pool, outbound traffic costs $0.01 per GiB.

The two General Purpose droplets above bring 8,000 GiB between them. Send 10,000 GiB in a month and the bill grows by $20. Two rules are easy to miss: traffic from a droplet to Spaces counts against the droplet pool, and Spaces keeps its own 1 TiB allowance that the droplets can't use.

DigitalOcean backups, volumes and Spaces pricing

Backups grow with the droplet: daily backups on the $126 General Purpose droplet are $37.80 a month.

DigitalOcean support plans

Every account gets ticket support around the clock, with a target reply in under 24 hours. Faster replies cost extra:

• Developer, $24 a month: replies in under 8 hours
• Standard, $99 a month: under 2 hours, plus live chat
• Premium, $999 a month: under 30 minutes, plus live chat

Live chat starts at Standard, so a team that wants to talk to someone while production is down adds $99 a month to everything above.

DigitalOcean vs Hetzner, Vultr and Linode pricing for one server

The fair comparison for a production server is dedicated CPU. Here's a server with 2 vCPUs, 8 GB of RAM and one public IPv4 address at five clouds, at US list prices on November 10, 2026:

On the server alone, we cost about a dollar more than DigitalOcean, and Hetzner is the cheapest here. What separates us is what comes after the server. Chat support is included, so there's no support plan to buy, and our median reply is under 2 minutes. We don't charge for outbound transfer at all, so the bill doesn't move when your traffic does. If the November 30 change is what sent you looking, our managed PostgreSQL has a data redundancy option with three replicas.

Send 10,000 GB a month from that one server and the bills spread out. It's still $64.13 on American Cloud. Hetzner comes to $62.39, Vultr to $108.80, DigitalOcean to $123 with $60 for the 6,000 GiB past its allowance, and Akamai to about $130.

[ One server sending 10,000 GB a month ]

For a whole stack, three servers with a load balancer and storage priced at three traffic levels, see our DigitalOcean alternative page. For the same server on eight clouds, see cloud server pricing compared. To price your own setup on American Cloud, use the pricing calculator.

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