DigitalOcean launches v5 Droplets, priced per resource with no monthly cap

DigitalOcean released v5 Droplets on August 25, 2026. Instead of picking a fixed bundle, you size vCPU, memory and disk separately and pay an hourly rate for each. They run on 5th Generation AMD EPYC processors and are available in four US datacenters: Atlanta (ATL1), Richmond (RIC1), Kansas City (MKC1) and Memphis (MEM1).

What it costs

Resource	Price per hour
Shared vCPU	$0.0158219
General Purpose (dedicated) vCPU	$0.028
Memory, per GiB	$0.0040411
NVMe boot disk, per GiB	$0.000137

DigitalOcean’s own example, an 8 vCPU Shared Droplet with 16 GiB of memory and a 30 GiB disk, comes to about $0.1953 an hour. Over a 730-hour month that is about $143, by our arithmetic.

How billing differs

v5 Droplets are billed per second, with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher. Unlike DigitalOcean’s bundled plans, they have no monthly cap. The pricing docs say bundled plans stop charging at 672 hours (28 days) a month. A v5 Droplet keeps charging for every hour, so a 31-day month costs more than a 30-day one.

Public IPv4 on a v5 Droplet appears as its own line on the invoice. Its introductory price is $0.00, and the docs say that price is subject to change. Outbound transfer above the free allowance costs $0.01 per GiB; inbound is free.

The two families

• Shared: 1 to 8 vCPUs and 1 to 24 GB of memory, at 1x to 3x memory per vCPU, with 2 Gbps of network throughput.
• General Purpose: dedicated vCPUs, 2 to 64 of them, with 4 to 512 GB of memory at 2x to 8x per vCPU, and 4 to 50 Gbps of throughput.

Each v5 Droplet has one NVMe boot disk and no extra local disk. You can grow the disk but not shrink it, and you can’t move a Droplet between a v5 configuration and a bundled plan after creating it.

Kansas City opened on August 4, 2026 and Memphis on August 10, 2026, per DigitalOcean’s platform release notes.

What to do

Before you pick v5 over a bundled Droplet, multiply its hourly total by 744 hours, a full 31-day month, and compare that with the bundled plan’s monthly price. Budget for IPv4 as a separate line, since its $0.00 price may not last.