How do we bill projects separately and/or transfer of resources to different teams or accounts?

Question

I have what I expect is a common problem:- the need to separate billing for different projects, even though I am the main technical administrator and want to maintain some oversight. This can happen, e.g.: (1) if you have private and work projects but don’t want them all billed on the same credit card, (2) you develop an app in house for speed but then want to be able transfer ownership (and particularly billing) to a customer or third party, (3) you have multiple different customers or friends you are helping and you don’t want all the bills to go through one card. Etc etc.

Some time back I requested support from DO on the topic and was advised the best way to separate billing was to create new Teams which could be billed using different credit cards.

I duly tried this. But it turns out that there is no way to actually transfer running instances of apps, databases or other resources from one team to another. The only option seems to set up everything from scratch. This is hardly convenient when we are talking about running apps and databases.

Am I missing something? There seem to be lots of requests for separate billing features or ability to transfer resources on ideas.digitalocean.com but no movement from DO, as far as I can tell.

Bobby Iliev · Answer

Hey,

Indeed, you are correct, the DigitalOcean Teams are designed to address billing separation. Each team can have its own credit card, billing settings, and members. However, as you’ve noticed, resources can’t currently be transferred between teams. This limitation means that once resources (Droplets, databases, etc.) are created under one team, they can’t be directly moved to another.

Teams are great for isolating projects for different customers or purposes, but the inability to transfer resources can create friction when scaling or transitioning ownership.

Although there isn’t a direct way to transfer resources between teams, here are some strategies:

For Droplets:

You can take a snapshot of a Droplet in one team, share the snapshot with the other team, and then create a new Droplet from that snapshot under the second team.
- Create a snapshot:
```
doctl compute droplet-action snapshot <droplet-id> --snapshot-name my-app-snapshot
```
- Share the snapshot and rebuild under the new team.
- https://docs.digitalocean.com/support/how-do-i-transfer-a-droplet-to-someone-else/

For App Platform and Managed Databases:

Unfortunately, there isn’t a 1 click way to migrate these resources. The best approach is to export data and the App spec configurations and redeploy in the new team.

For Kubernetes:

Export manifests or configurations and reapply them in a cluster under the new team.

If the end goal is to hand over control to a third party (e.g., a customer), what you could do is to setup a new account for your customer and provide credentials to the customer, then they can update payment details and secure access afterward.

Or alternatively, you can rebuild the resources under their own account or team. It’s not ideal but it ensures a clean handoff.

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.