Bandwidth Billing

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

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 will count against the transfer pool for that Droplet’s account. 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 account 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 accounts or teams.

Monthly Allowance

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 will earn 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 will accrue 1,000 GiB / 672 hours ≈ 1.5 GiB per hour that the Droplet exists. Droplet usage is rounded to the nearest hour.

Estimated Droplet Transfer Pool

We collect usage data and display projections about your transfer pool, which you can view on your account’s Billing page.

Estimates are based on the assumption that the same daily averages for both the number of active Droplets and bandwidth usage will be 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 will not trigger a billing alert until they are applied to the invoice.

Kubernetes Worker Nodes

Starting on 1 July 2022, a DOKS cluster will 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 will 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.

Prior to 1 July 2022, you may have been receiving a slightly higher free bandwidth on 30 and 31-day months. Individual worker nodes were billed per hour, up to a maximum of 744 hours per month (31 days * 24 hours). As a result, they could accrue extra bandwidth allowance beyond the advertised monthly allowance for the corresponding Droplet plan. If your bandwidth consistently exceeds the accrued bandwidth, review your usage.

App Platform

App Platform bundles a certain amount of bandwidth per component for the Starter, Basic, and Professional tiers.

Feature Starter Basic Professional
Outbound transfer 1 GiB 40 GiB 100 GiB

If an App Platform component uses more bandwidth than this, it is billed at a rate of $0.10 per GiB.

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 $0.10 per GiB.

Spaces

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:

  • From Spaces in NYC3 to Droplets in NYC1, NYC2, and NYC3
  • From Spaces in SGP1 to Droplets in SGP1
  • From Spaces in SFO2 to Droplets in SFO1, SFO2, and SFO3
  • From Spaces in SFO3 to Droplets in SFO1, SFO2, and SFO3
  • From Spaces in AMS3 to Droplets in AMS2 and AMS3
  • From Spaces in FRA1 to Droplets in FRA1
  • From Spaces in SYD1 to Droplets in SYD1
  • From Spaces in BLR1 to Droplets in BLR1

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.

Databases

Traffic to and from Managed Databases does not count against your bandwidth billing transfer allowance.

Load Balancers

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.