By squarology
Will I be charged the whole monthly price for using it for less than a week? Or will I be charged hourly for the time I’ve had it running (it’s been about 4 days)?
thanks for the clarification :)
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You’re charged hourly up to a maximum of the monthly cost for each Droplet that you have deployed, whether it’s on or off, up to the point the Droplet is destroyed. So 4 days, or 96 hours, would be billed to your account where the actual amount would be 96x the hourly cost of the Droplet (or the actual number of hours at the time you decide to destroy it).
The reason for this is because your Droplet still occupies system resources (i.e. CPU, RAM and SSD Disk Space), which cannot be assigned to another customer on that server so long as it’s allocated to your account.
Hi there,
Quick update here, as of January 1, 2026, DigitalOcean bills Droplets per second, with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01 (whichever is higher).
This update means you’re only billed for the exact amount of time your Droplet runs, instead of by the hour as before. You can find the full details in the DigitalOcean changelog.
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