Hello,

Yes, you could absolutely do that and you would be charged only for the hours that the droplet existed.

To create a snapshot, it usually takes up to 1 minute per GB of data used by your Droplet. So if your droplet uses 20GB, that it could take up to 20 minutes for the snapshot process to complete.

You can automate the whole process with the DigitalOcean’s API. So for example to create a new droplet based on a snapshot, you need to supply its ID for the image parameter:

curl -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -H 'Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN' -d \
    '{"name":"example.com","region":"nyc3","size":"1024mb","image": 12345}' \
    "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets" 

Hope that this helps.
Regards,
Bobby

if i turn off a droplet, would be charged too ?