I don’t understand billing in DO and the billing articles don’t seem to clarify this.
- I am paying 5/month for spaces
- I am paying 7/month for a dev db
- I am paying 5/month for an app platform
I think those prices are right, tldr I chose the cheapest plans of all three for now.
Currently my bill is ~$2 and increments each day. I’m confused because I thought I had a set price. I’m also concerned because no one has visited my site (it’s days old) and I’ve probably done 20 builds to get it running, and simply visited my site a few times. If doing close to literally nothing is already costing me dollars, should I be concerned if I get 100s or 1000s of visitors a day?
This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.
You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!
Accepted Answer
Hi there,
The way it works is that each service you create (Spaces, Databases, App Platform, Droplets, etc.) has an hourly rate with a monthly cap. For example, the $5/month plan is billed at around $0.007/hour until it reaches $5. If the service runs for the whole month, you’ll pay the full monthly price. If you delete it earlier, you’ll only pay for the hours it was active. For example if you create a server and only have it for 1 hour, then destroy it, you will only be charged for that 1 hour specifically.
That’s why you’re seeing your bill slowly increase each day, it’s just the hourly usage adding up. You’re not being billed for visitors to your site or for doing builds on App Platform. The charges are only for the resources you’ve selected.
So to answer your concern:
-
You won’t suddenly get a huge bill from traffic or a few test builds.
-
The maximum you’ll pay is the listed monthly price for each service, unless you go over included limits like storage or bandwidth: https://docs.digitalocean.com/platform/billing/bandwidth/ ; but with all services you get a very generous bandwidth allowance.
-
If you destroy a service before the end of the month, you only pay for the hours it was running.
This way you can experiment without worrying about unexpected charges.
Become a contributor for community
Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.
DigitalOcean Documentation
Full documentation for every DigitalOcean product.
Resources for startups and SMBs
The Wave has everything you need to know about building a business, from raising funding to marketing your product.
The developer cloud
Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.
Get started for free
Sign up and get $200 in credit for your first 60 days with DigitalOcean.*
*This promotional offer applies to new accounts only.