Question

How do I cap usage?

I originally signed up with D.O. years ago because they shut down your resources after your pre-paid credit ran out. If I want “alerts”, I can just use AWS. I’m looking to shut down my services automatically at a certain billing level. My account is for instructional purposes. I’m not interested in open-ended billing where an accident can bankrupt you.


Submit an answer


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!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
Site Moderator badge
June 16, 2024

Hey @dwmantaray,

DigitalOcean does not currently offer an automated way to cap your usage and shut down your services once you reach a specific billing level.

What I personally do is to set up billing alerts to notify me when my spending reaches a certain threshold. You can set those thresholds pretty low so that you would get notified early.

You can also write a shell script to shutdown your Droplets so that you could do that quickly in case that you get an alert. You can use the doctl CLI to do that:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/doctl/reference/compute/droplet-action/shutdown/

The best thing to do to get your voice heard regarding this would be to head over to our Product Ideas board and post a new idea, including as much information as possible for what you’d like to see implemented.

https://ideas.digitalocean.com/

- Bobby.

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Featured on Community

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more