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Alternatives

DigitalOcean alternatives, with prices attached.

App Platform prices per component per month. That is easy to predict and expensive for anything small, which is why people compare it.

DigitalOcean is two different products in this conversation: droplets, which are plain virtual machines and very hard to beat on price, and App Platform, which is the managed layer on top. Most people looking for alternatives mean the second. Published App Platform prices below, checked 22 August 2026.

The options

  • Railway$5 Hobby, $20 Pro

    Metered per vCPU-hour rather than per component, so a service that idles costs less than a fixed instance. Largest template library in the category.

  • RenderFree static, $7 instance

    Closest in shape to App Platform — a flat instance price, predictable, no metering to reason about.

  • DockupFree, then $5 or $20

    Metered per vCPU-hour and GB-month, and runs Linux and Windows VMs as well as containers. Persistent storage at $0.10 per GB-month.

  • Fly.ioFrom about $2 per machine

    The cheapest way to run several small things in several regions. You operate more of it yourself.

  • Hetzner or a plain dropletFrom a few euros

    If you were going to manage the server anyway, raw compute is far cheaper than any managed layer. You are buying back the operations work.

  • Staying on App PlatformFree tier, from $5

    If your droplets and database are already at DigitalOcean, one bill and one private network is a real advantage. A fixed 1 vCPU / 512 MiB instance is $5 a month and a development database is $7.

Questions this page gets asked

Is DigitalOcean App Platform expensive?

It depends entirely on how much your service idles. App Platform charges per component per month — $5 for a fixed 1 vCPU / 512 MiB instance, $12 for a shared 1 vCPU / 1 GiB, $25 for 1 vCPU / 2 GiB, published rates checked 22 August 2026. A metered platform bills for the hours you actually consume, which is cheaper for bursty work and roughly the same for a service that runs flat out.

What is the cheapest DigitalOcean alternative?

For raw compute, Hetzner. For a managed platform, Fly.io machines from around $2, or Dockup’s free plan, which grants $10 of infrastructure credit and does not sleep. Cheapest is not the same as least work — a plain server costs less and asks more.

Does DigitalOcean charge for bandwidth?

App Platform includes a bandwidth allowance that varies with container size, from 50 to 250 GiB, and bills additional outbound transfer at $0.02 per GiB. Dedicated egress IPs are $25 a month per app. Published rates, checked 22 August 2026.

Should I use droplets instead of App Platform?

If you are comfortable maintaining a server, yes — droplets are substantially cheaper for the same resources, and the difference is the operations work. App Platform and every alternative on this page exist to sell you that work back.

Compare something else

Try it against your own workload.

The free plan grants $10 of infrastructure credit at signup, needs no card, and does not sleep.

Start free with $10 creditSee the rates