Announcing per-sec billing, new Droplet plans, BYOIP, and NAT gateway to reduce scaling costs

Announcing per-sec billing, new Droplet plans, BYOIP, and NAT gateway to reduce scaling costs | DigitalOcean

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Dark mode is coming soon. Product updates Announcing per-sec billing, new Droplet plans, BYOIP, and NAT gateway to reduce scaling costs

By Anantha Ramachandran and Nihar Namjoshi

Updated: February 4, 2026 7 min read

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To help users cut down on cloud spending that’s wasted due to over-provisioning and inflexible billing models, we’re introducing tools that offer granular control without sacrificing simplicity or cost-effectiveness. We’re excited to announce new product updates that offer granular cost control, improved performance, and a clear path to savings.

TL;DR

DigitalOcean has transitioned to per-second billing for Droplets. Starting from January 1, 2026, you only pay for the exact compute time you use, perfect for slashing costs on ephemeral tasks and CI/CD pipelines. Create Droplets for short-lived workloads.

New dedicated Droplet plans are now generally available for a seamless performance upgrade. Visit your DigitalOcean console to create these new Droplets.

Bring your own IP is now generally available to protect your IP reputation. Check out our documentation or visit your DigitalOcean console to bring your own ip.

VPC NAT gateway is now generally available for centralized egress and static IPs. Join our webinar: Stop the manual struggle of managing NAT instances and bastion hosts or check out our documentation or visit your DigitalOcean console to set up your NAT gateway.

Droplets per-second billing slashes costs for ephemeral workloads

Traditional hourly billing models for virtual machines have resulted in customers paying for idle time, even for short-lived workloads. Starting from Jan 1, 2026, our billing model transitioned to a per-second basis for Droplets , with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher. This new approach aims to optimize cost control by charging for exact usage over a minute, making it simple to get precise billing for your actual usage. For sustained workloads, the monthly cap of 672 hours (24 hours x 28 days) of usage remains in place, ensuring your bill never exceeds the predictable monthly price.

Imagine your development team uses a CI/CD pipeline that uses $84/month CPU-Optimized Droplet to run automated tests taking 10 minutes. With hourly billing, each 10-minute task would charge you for the full hour, costing about $0.125. If you ran this job 20 times a day, your daily cost would have been around $2.50, even though the total active time was just over 3 hours. Now, with per-second billing, that same 10-minute task costs only about $0.02. By running the job 20 times a day, your total daily cost is just around $0.42.

Per-second billing can provide a similarly dramatic cost reduction by ensuring you only pay for the precise compute time you use. Effective Jan 1, 2026, this change will apply automatically to all Droplets. Customers will be able to access detailed usage information, including Droplet start and end times, through their billing history and downloadable CSV reports.

Use cases:

CI/CD pipelines and automated testing: Only pay for the duration of testing jobs (with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher), not full hours.

Auto-scaled applications: Instances that briefly scale up will only be billed for active time (with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher), reducing costs.

Event-driven batch jobs: Intermittent, event-triggered tasks will be billed precisely for compute time (with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher), avoiding full-hour charges.

Benefits:

Granular cost control: Pay only for the seconds your Droplets are active, with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher.

Optimized auto-scaling: Scale up and down to meet demand without incurring full hourly charges for brief usage, with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher, per instance.

Budget predictability: Retain the monthly cap for continuous workloads.

Read documentation to learn more and Create Droplets for short-lived workloads.

New dedicated Droplet plans for a seamless performance upgrade

Historically, upgrading from a shared CPU Droplet to a dedicated CPU Droplet for more consistent, sustained performance meant a large, costly leap in resources. This created a significant pain point for customers who needed the better performance of premium Droplets while retaining their static IP and avoiding a complex data migration.

To better address diverse needs, we are introducing new intermediate Droplet sizes for our dedicated CPU optimized and general-purpose plans. The new sizes include:

Dedicated CPU Optimized Regular: 5x SSD variant

Dedicated CPU Optimized Premium: 5x SSD variant

Dedicated General Purpose Regular: 6.5x SSD variant

Dedicated General Purpose Premium: 5.5x SSD variant

Additionally, the following sizes are exclusively available through our sales channel:

Dedicated CPU Optimized Premium: 96vCPU

Dedicated Storage Optimized Premium: 1.5x variant with 10TiB NVMe SSD

These new sizes provide a more balanced resource profile, offering a seamless in-place upgrade path without the need to recreate Droplets. This allows for easy migration to a dedicated environment, preserving your existing IP and application data, and avoiding payment for unneeded vCPUs or RAM.

To learn more about various Droplet plans and how to choose the right one, refer to choose the right CPU Droplet .

Use cases:

AI/ML: A growing AI startup running a compute-intensive model on a shared CPU plan can seamlessly transition to a dedicated CPU plan to ensure consistent performance.

SaaS: A SaaS provider with a single-tenant architecture can easily upgrade a customer’s Droplet to a dedicated CPU plan as their needs grow, all while keeping their static IP and existing data.

Benefits:

Precise resource allocation: Get the right compute and memory for your workload without over-provisioning.

Zero-downtime upgrades: Transition from a shared to a dedicated CPU plan without the need for a full Droplet migration.

Cost-effective performance: Access consistent CPU performance without a steep increase in your monthly bill.

Visit your DigitalOcean console to create these new Droplets or see Droplet pricing page for more details

Bring your own IP (BYOIP) to protect your IP…