DigitalOcean

The developer cloud

As of 30 August 2026, DigitalOcean has a free plan and paid plans start at $4/month. DigitalOcean is a cloud services platform providing virtual private servers (Droplets), managed databases, Kubernetes, container registry, and other infrastruct. Softwr lists it under Cloud. DigitalOcean is made by DigitalOcean Inc, launched in 2011, available on Linux, Web.

Visit siteVisit DigitalOcean

Overview

What DigitalOcean does

DigitalOcean is a cloud services platform providing virtual private servers (Droplets), managed databases, Kubernetes, container registry, and other infrastructure products in a simple, affordable way.

What people use it for

Developers seeking affordable VPS starting at $4/month for small applications
Teams deploying containerised workloads with Kubernetes starting at $12/month cluster cost
Data scientists and ML engineers requiring NVIDIA GPU access at $1.91/GPU/hour (committed)

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about DigitalOcean.

Data transfer overage charged at $0.01 per GiB beyond included allowances
Free tier includes only 3 static sites; additional static sites require paid upgrade
Container registry free tier capped at 500 MiB storage; exceeding requires paid tier
Functions free tier allows 90,000 GiB-seconds monthly; overages billed on usage basis
GPU Droplets require minimum monthly commitment for lower hourly rates; on-demand significantly more expensive

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of DigitalOcean

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

DigitalOceanvs
Grafana Cloud
Grafana Cloud: Composable observability platform
DigitalOceanvs
Neon
Neon: Serverless Postgres for modern developers
DigitalOceanvs
AWS (Amazon Web Services)
AWS (Amazon Web Services): The leading cloud computing platform
DigitalOceanvs
Lambda (AWS Serverless)
Lambda (AWS Serverless): Run code without thinking about servers

Capabilities

Features

Droplets (VPS)
Managed Kubernetes
App Platform
Managed Databases
Spaces (Object Storage)
Floating IPs
Load Balancers
Firewalls
Terraform
Integration with Terraform
Docker
Integration with Docker
Kubernetes
Integration with Kubernetes
Git
Integration with Git

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

How much does a DigitalOcean Droplet cost?

The cheapest Basic Droplet is $4.00 per month, or $0.00595 per hour, and includes 1 vCPU, 512 MiB of memory, 10 GiB of SSD and 500 GiB of transfer. The next step up is $6.00 per month with 1 GiB of memory, 25 GiB of SSD and 1,000 GiB of transfer.

Source

How is DigitalOcean billed?

Droplets are billed hourly as well as monthly, and DigitalOcean states that Bundled Plan and v5 Droplets are billed on a per second basis with a 60 second minimum charge.

Source

What does the cheapest DigitalOcean plan include?

At $4.00 per month you get a single vCPU, 512 MiB of memory, 10 GiB of SSD storage and 500 GiB of outbound transfer. That is the smallest Basic Droplet DigitalOcean sells.

Source

Behind it

Who makes DigitalOcean

Company: DigitalOcean Inc
Based in: New York, NY

Timeline

DigitalOcean over time

Funding2021-03-23$775.5m
Initial public offering pricing
Source
Funding2015-07-08$83m
Series B funding round
Source

Keep looking

Where to go from DigitalOcean

Best Cloud software for

Compare DigitalOcean with

Other Cloud software

Hetzner Cloud
Affordable cloud servers in Europe
Free, then €3.29/mo13 researched notes
Scaleway
European cloud for developers
Free, then €0.01/hour10 researched notes
Linode
Affordable cloud hosting and infrastructure
Free, then $5/mo11 researched notes
Contabo
Affordable high-performance VPS hosting
From €4.5/mo11 researched notes
Vultr
High performance cloud compute
Free, then $2.5/mo5 researched notes
Wasabi
Hot cloud storage without egress fees
From $7.99/mo12 researched notes
Neon
Serverless Postgres for modern developers
Free plan10 researched notes
Render
A modern cloud platform for the next generation
Free plan12 researched notes
AWS (Amazon Web Services)
The leading cloud computing platform
Free plan12 researched notes
Fly.io
Deploy web applications globally
From $29/mo14 researched notes
Railway
Ship software instantly
Free plan13 researched notes
Google Cloud Platform
Trusted by millions of enterprises
Free plan13 researched notes
Cerebrium
Serverless GPU infrastructure for real-time AI inference and applications
Free, then $100/mo10 researched notes
DeepInfra
Low-cost cloud API for running open-source AI models
From $0.08/mo11 researched notes
K3s
Lightweight certified Kubernetes distribution in a single binary
Open source9 researched notes
Proxmox VE
Open-source hypervisor combining KVM and LXC virtualisation
From €120/yr12 researched notes
Go
Build fast, reliable, and efficient software at scale
Free plan7 researched notes
Rancher
Kubernetes management platform for multiple clusters
Open source9 researched notes

Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for DigitalOcean, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.