New $4 Droplet and updated pricing

Since we introduced Droplets a decade ago, we’ve grown alongside our customers as their needs have changed. We’ve invested in our infrastructure, expanded our geographic footprint, and introduced new products like DigitalOcean Kubernetes, App Platform, and Managed Databases. These investments have attracted a new set of customers to DigitalOcean—startups and growing businesses. That's why today we are announcing that for the first time there will be a price change on some of our products from July 1, 2022, combined with the introduction of a new, more affordable $4 Droplet. More importantly, we are changing how we adapt our offerings to meet the needs of our customers and their desire to create software that changes the world.

The developer journey

Customers use DigitalOcean for use cases ranging from testing new ideas to hosting business-critical applications. As we’ve developed a greater understanding of our customers and what motivates them, we have noticed a pattern of usage on DigitalOcean that we refer to as the developer journey.

The developer journey starts with learning. With so much new technology being made available today, developers are constantly in learning mode. There is always a new open source technology to try out, or a novel programming model to master. Once armed with this new expertise, developers set out to build their next application as part of a startup, a non-profit, or a more established business. If the application is successful, they may need to scale rapidly to meet the demands of customers across the globe. Whether the application is successful or not, developers will always move on to their next application, sometimes learning new technology and new skill sets to help them innovate faster.

Learners

Empowering the developer community is at the core of DigitalOcean’s values. DigitalOcean has always been committed to providing free resources to the global developer community through our technical tutorials, Q&A, tech talks, and events like Hacktoberfest. Today, over 10 million of these developers come to our website every month to learn about programming languages, operating systems, and more. Our recent acquisition of CSS-Tricks furthered this commitment to democratizing development through investments in learning content. We also partner with organizations like GitHub Education to give students access to DigitalOcean products. 

We hope our new $4 Droplet, available from July 1, 2022, will serve developers at this stage of the journey. This new Droplet has 1 vCPU, 512MB memory, 500GB bandwidth, and a 10GB SSD Disk. It is ideal for learning, experimentation, and proof of concepts, enabling a cost-effective graduation path from development to production.

Builders

Many DigitalOcean users are developers looking to build innovative digital products using APIs and cloud-native applications. They want to move fast with cloud products that are simple and easy to use with affordable and predictable pricing. These “builders” represent the fastest growing segment of DigitalOcean’s customer base and include early-stage startups like those we sponsor through Hatch, our global startup program.

Our 25GB SSD Droplets, now starting at $6/month, provide builders the confidence to host and scale their VM-based applications with generous data transfer and affordable bandwidth. We see these developers extending their Droplets with managed databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, and over 200 1-click applications in our marketplace. For developers using container technology, DigitalOcean’s Managed Kubernetes service starts at $12/month and provides seamless compatibility with the open source, cloud-native ecosystem. For developers writing modern serverless and JAMstack applications, DigitalOcean’s App Platform is only $5/month, and offers the fastest path from code-to-cloud.

Scalers 

Today DigitalOcean also serves customers who are growing rapidly. These customers are building applications to enable artificial intelligence, video streaming, and blockchain use-cases. They are utilizing multiple products across our compute, networking, storage, and managed service offerings. Many of these customers progressed through the learning and building phases on DigitalOcean, starting out by spending less than $15/mo with us. By enabling the scaling stage of the developer journey with an expanded product offering and customer success capabilities, this group has continued to grow on DigitalOcean.

Growing companies benefit from a wide array of Droplet sizes, which allow businesses to find the optimal performance for their workload. We offer production-ready object storage and highly available block storage designed to make storing data easy, and data-driven insights possible. Our load balancers and networking products help auto-scale applications, allowing cloud spend to increase and decrease based on demand. These business-oriented capabilities aren’t restricted to Droplets or infrastructure, they extend into our container products, Managed Kubernetes, Serverless, Managed Databases, and other popular paradigms for building applications. And we are just getting started.

Get growing with DigitalOcean 

While this journey from learning, to building, to scaling is a pattern we see from developers on DigitalOcean, we also understand the developer journey is fluid and isn’t always linear. Building a business with digital products is complicated. That’s why our products aim to deliver the simplest developer experience in the market. We want developers using DigitalOcean to get started easily, test out their next idea quickly, and ultimately create software that changes the world. So what are you waiting for? Go on. Get Growing.