So the hourly pricing is for instance if you create a droplet and a few hours later you decide mm i don’t need it anymore and you destroy it the hours it was running is priced on the hourly pricing . Now the monthly pricing is what you seem to need for your use case . so example you select a 5$ droplet then you will only pay 5$ a month as long as you stay within the bandwidth and storage needs of course :)

i use it as a basic hosting service and use if for a scalable production environment . its geared to what ever you want to do with it if its testing you can spin up a droplet for a few hours or keep it running 24/7 with the monthly pricing.

been running droplets for about 6 months now and never had a surprise bill shoved under my nose . its pretty straightforward . i’ve also done the round of cloud hosting providers and didn’t find anything cheaper then the 5$ droplet compared to other providers . and the dashboard is really nice :-) . good luck with your dev’s .