By SonuKrJe
Hi,
I’m a student using the GitHub Student Developer Pack. I created a $12/month droplet on DigitalOcean for testing purposes, but I forgot to destroy it after I was done. Because of that, it kept running and used up my credits.
Now I’m seeing a pending charge of $10.01 on my account. I’ve already deleted all resources to prevent any further charges.
Could you please guide me on what I should do in this situation? Is there any way this charge can be waived or reduced, considering this was an unintentional mistake?
Thank you.
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Hi there,
Good that you already deleted everything to stop further charges.
For the $10 charge, there is no way to handle this through the community forum, it needs to go directly to the billing team. Open a support ticket at https://cloud.digitalocean.com/support, explain that you are a student on the GitHub Developer Pack, that the Droplet was left running by mistake, and that you have since cleaned everything up. Billing teams do sometimes offer a one-time courtesy credit for situations like this, especially for students, but there is no guarantee.
For the future, a good habit is to set up billing alerts under Billing > Alerts in the control panel so you get an email notification if your usage crosses a threshold you set. That way a forgotten Droplet does not catch you off guard again.
Heya, @sonukrje
Destroying the droplet stops future charges, but it does not remove charges that already accrued while it was running. So what you’re seeing ($10.01) is likely usage that already happened before deletion not something still accumulating.
Check the billing breakdown in your DigitalOcean account:
- Go to Billing → Usage
- Confirm the charge is specifically for the droplet runtime (compute hours)
If it matches your forgotten droplet, then from a system point of view it’s valid usage.
Regards
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