Introducing Agent Droplets: everything an agent needs, one price, one bill

Last week we launched DigitalOcean Managed Agents in public preview: a managed runtime, governed access to more than 16,000 tools, serverless inference, and persistent memory and storage, all on one cloud. Developers have already started thousands of agent sessions. Today we’re making the next part simpler: paying for it.

Building an agent that does something useful has gotten easy. Running it has not. A production agent needs a harness to drive the loop, a sandbox to execute code safely, inference to think, storage to remember between sessions, and tools to reach the web and other systems. Today, those come from different companies, each billing in its own unit on a separate invoice.

Here is one stack a customer described to us: OpenCode Go as the harness, Fly.io for sandboxes, AWS for storage, Fireworks for inference on open models, Anthropic for frontier models, and Parallel for web search. The harness was a flat monthly subscription. Sandbox time was billed per CPU-hour and GB-hour. Inference was per token, at a different rate for every model. Storage was per gigabyte-month plus requests. Search was per thousand queries. Six vendors, six invoices, dozens of pricing units, and a pile of glue code to hold it together.

Nobody on the team could say what a single agent run had cost.

The offerings that try to combine some of these pieces have a gap in the middle. Sandbox vendors do not run inference. Harness and model vendors do not run sandboxes or storage, and some limit agent workloads on their flat subscriptions. The hyperscalers do run everything, but they meter it as a dozen separate line items with enterprise-grade complexity to match. If you are one developer or a small team, none of these give you the thing you actually want: a price you can predict and a bill you can read.

A better way, from the people who brought you the Droplet

Fourteen years ago we put a virtual machine on the internet for $5 a month with everything included, and called it a Droplet. A generation of developers built on it because they could understand the bill. Agents are in the same place now, and we think the answer is the same. Unlike anyone else in this market, DigitalOcean prices the microVMs, storage, inference on our own hosted models, and governed access to 16,000+ tools as one simple plan with one discount. Competitors who run comparable infrastructure still sell these as separate metered line items or add-ons, for example, memory, gateway, and observability are billed separately on AWS AgentCore. DigitalOcean bundles all of it into a single plan.

Today we’re introducing Agent Droplets, one simple monthly price for DigitalOcean Managed Agents.

Pick an Agent Droplet, build your agents, and the discount applies automatically to everything they use: the compute and memory they run on, the DigitalOcean-hosted inference behind them, the storage they keep between sessions, and the tools they reach. Every agent resource is discounted, not just one layer. When your Agent Droplet allowance is used up, usage continues at list prices from your Inference and Agent Balance. Your agents keep working, and there is still only one bill.

We also include things other vendors charge for:

• No limit on the number of environments. Run one or a hundred on any Agent Droplet.

• No seat charges. An Agent Droplet covers your team’s agents, not a head count.

• No charge for enterprise security. Enterprise-grade IAM is included on every Agent Droplet.

Agents run inside dedicated microVMs that start in seconds, resume from a pause in about 300 milliseconds, and pause automatically when they are not working, so an idle agent costs almost nothing. Bring the harness you already use: Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, Hermes, or agents built with CrewAI or LangGraph.

We plan to add more resources to Agent Droplets over time.

Six vendors and six bills today, versus one Agent Droplet on DigitalOcean.

Try it free, then scale into a plan

New customers can start with a free trial: $5 in credit, no card required, enough to take an idea from zero to running this afternoon. When you’re ready for more, Agent Droplet Pro and Team apply a bigger discount to every hour, token, and gigabyte your agents use, 15% off on Pro and 20% off on Team. Moving up a tier costs more but lowers the price of everything underneath it.

Example workloads and resource usage

*Figures are estimates, not an included allowance; actual usage depends on your workload. Estimates assume a usage mix of ~70% inference, ~24% compute and memory, about 4% storage and about 2% tools; inference at $0.7766 per 1M tokens (blended average for GLM 5.3); and compute on the Medium shape (2 vCPU, 4 GB).

If your Inference and Agent Balance reaches $0, running sessions pause at the next safe stopping point and their working state is preserved in a snapshot. Completed work is preserved; add funds to resume where you left off.

What $50 of agent work looks like on paper

Take the stack from earlier and give it a month of realistic work: a few agents running about two hours a day, mostly on open models, with a frontier-class model for the hard steps. Here is what arrives in the inbox at the end of the month, and what the same work looks like on Agent Droplet Pro.

Six invoices, 17 line items, and 10 pricing units for one month of agent work, versus one line on one bill. Illustrative; competitor rates are published list prices as of September 2026, rounded.

How Agent Droplet Pro compares

Here is what the $50 a month Agent Droplet Pro gets you next to the alternatives.

Competitor pricing as published in September 2026; see each vendor’s pricing page for current rates.

One balance for your agents

Agent Droplets launch alongside Inference and Agents Balance, a prepaid balance scoped only to AI products. Fund it in any amount from $5 to $500, and it’s redeemable against Harness Runtime, Action Gateway, and Serverless Inference. Standard infrastructure like Droplets, Spaces, and Managed Databases will still be billed at the end of your billing cycle as usual. Your core cloud spend keeps running exactly as it does today, completely untouched.

Fund your Inference and Agents Balance directly, and your agents draw on it automatically once your Agent Droplet allowance is used up. You never have to prepay the rest of your DigitalOcean bill to keep agents running.

Get started today

Agent Droplets are available today for DigitalOcean Managed Agents in public preview. If you already run agents on Claude Code, Codex CLI, or OpenCode, point them at DigitalOcean and they can run on an Agent Droplet with minimal setup. New DigitalOcean users get a $5 credit to launch their first agent session.

“The Droplet was never about a server or a VM,” says Vinay Kumar, Chief Product and Technology Officer at DigitalOcean. “It was about the moment you have an idea at 11 p.m. and want it running before you go to sleep. Agents should feel like that. An Agent Droplet is one subscription for everything an agent needs. We take the guesswork out of adopting new agent technologies and managing spend, so companies can start their journey with DigitalOcean and scale it with us. You pick a size and start.”