Billing confusion

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.