Details on bandwidth billing for DigitalOcean products are included on the respective products’ overview pages. This page summarizes the same information for all products that charge for bandwidth.
Bandwidth billing is automated and you can view your charges on your invoice. There are no regional variations on bandwidth pricing.
You can calculate bandwidth costs using our Bandwidth Calculator.
Droplets include free outbound data transfer, starting at 500 GiB/month for the smallest plan. Bandwidth allowances are determined by the Droplet’s size and type.
Excess data transfer is billed at $0.01 per GiB. Inbound bandwidth to Droplets is always free. To calculate bandwidth costs for your Droplets and databases, use our Bandwidth Calculator.
Any data transfer sent by a Droplet using a public network interface counts against the transfer pool for that Droplet’s team. All IPv6 traffic uses the public interface. Data transfer between Droplets over the VPC network uses a private network interface. We do not bill for outbound data transfer that we determine is dropped by a DigitalOcean firewall rule.
Transfer allowance is pooled cumulatively at the team level, not individually at the Droplet level. For example, if you run two Droplets for a full month, each with 1,000 GiB/month allowance, you accrue a 2,000 GiB allowance. Let’s say you transfer 1,500 GiB of data with the first Droplet, which is over its individual limit, and 100 GiB of data with the second Droplet, you would still be under the total limit of 2000 GiB by 400 GiB and would not be charged any overage fees.
Accrued transfer does not roll over between months and cannot be transferred between teams.
Your monthly transfer allowance depends on your monthly Droplet usage; for every hour a Droplet exists, it accrues transfer allowance.
Droplets are billed per hour up to a maximum of 672 hours per month (28 days multiplied by 24 hours). For every hour the Droplet exists during the month, whether it’s powered on or not, it earns 1/672 of its total allowance up to that limit. Once it’s been active for 672 hours, it has reached its full bandwidth allowance.
For example, if a Droplet’s maximum monthly data transfer allowance is 1,000 GiB, it accrues 1,000 GiB / 672 hours ≈ 1.5 GiB per hour that the Droplet exists. Droplet usage is rounded to the nearest hour.
We collect usage data and display projections about your transfer pool, which you can view on your team’s Billing page.
Estimates are based on the assumption that the same daily averages for both the number of active Droplets and bandwidth usage are maintained through the end of the month. Outbound data transfer and projected transfer allowance are updated once daily.
Billing alerts are triggered on the basis of actual usage, so projections of transfer in excess of the transfer pool do not trigger a billing alert until they are applied to the invoice.
DOKS clusters accrue free bandwidth based on the worker pool’s largest sizes within 28 days of usage.
For example, if your worker pool has Droplets with a monthly bandwidth quota of 5TB, then you accrue free bandwidth at the rate of 5TiB/(24*28) * worker_pool_size = 7.44 GiB/hr * worker_pool_size. For autoscaling clusters, the size of the worker pools vary.
App Platform bundles a certain amount of bandwidth for each component.
If an App Platform component uses more bandwidth than this, it is billed at a rate of $0.02 per GiB. For example, if your component’s plan has a 100 GiB allowance and it ends up using 150 GiB in a given month, we charge an additional $1 for the 50 GiB overage.
Only bandwidth from responses sent by the CDN (Content Delivery Network) counts towards this allotment, while bandwidth from requests does not. For example, if your app makes a request to a Droplet, that request does not count towards the app’s bandwidth allotment, but the Droplet’s response counts towards the Droplet’s bandwidth allotment, and is billed with the Droplet’s rate if it exceeds its own transfer limit. All products have their bandwidth pooled separately.
Therefore, in App Platform, only egress traffic to external PoPs (Points of Presence) counts towards the app’s bandwidth allotment and may be charged.
Additionally, the total bandwidth is not allocated on the first day of the month. It’s prorated across the entire 28 days. This means that on the first day of the month, the App receives 1/28th of its monthly bandwidth allotment. If the App usage goes beyond this limit, we bill it at a rate of $0.02 per GiB.
Spaces subscriptions include 1,024 GiB of outbound data transfer (from Spaces buckets to the internet), which is shared between all buckets. Additional outbound transfer is $0.01 per GiB. Outbound data transfer is free in the following cases:
Inbound bandwidth to Spaces never counts against your Spaces transfer allowance.
Droplets have their own transfer allowance, independent of Spaces. Traffic from Droplets to Spaces does not count against your Spaces transfer allowance (because inbound bandwidth to Spaces is free), but does currently count against your Droplets’ outbound transfer allowance.
Invoices include a breakdown of bandwidth usage and cost per Spaces bucket. If you have 100 or more Spaces buckets, you can only view this breakdown in the CSV version of the invoice. To view or download invoices, see our Invoices billing page.
Traffic to and from managed databases does not count against your bandwidth billing transfer allowance.
DigitalOcean Load Balancers by themselves don’t generate bandwidth charges; they are bandwidth neutral.
The public outbound traffic that originates from your resources and passes through the load balancer counts towards your bandwidth limit. In this scenario, the aggregated bandwidth is reported as part of the load balancer and not attributed to the individual resources behind it.