AWS sells capacity in units you assemble yourself. EC2 on-demand Linux pricing in us-east-1 runs from t4g.micro at $0.0084 per hour through t3.micro at $0.0104 and t2.micro at $0.0116, all metered per second, and behind the same login sit managed Postgres, object storage, load balancers, queues, containers and an identity system the company counts within a portfolio of more than 240 services. Thirty-plus of those services remain free inside monthly usage limits, and new accounts receive up to $200 in credits. The pricing is legible per item and opaque as a whole, because the total depends on how many supporting resources your architecture implies.
TL;DR
AWS is the broad platform: t4g.micro at $0.0084/hr and t3.micro at $0.0104/hr in us-east-1, per-second billing, 240-plus services behind the same account, 30-plus of them free within monthly limits. DigitalOcean is the narrow one: a Droplet starts at $4/mo for 512 MiB and 1 vCPU ($0.00595/hr), Kubernetes starts at $12/mo with the control plane free, and App Platform starts at $0. DigitalOcean's smaller catalogue is the point — it publishes a short list of shapes and one price per shape, while AWS gives you every combination and the responsibility that comes with it. Small teams and first servers favor DigitalOcean; anything with managed data services, compliance needs or a wide integration surface favors AWS.
DigitalOcean publishes far fewer numbers. A basic Droplet with 512 MiB of memory and 1 vCPU lists at $4.00 per month ($0.00595 per hour) with 10 GiB of SSD and 500 GiB of transfer; the next shapes are $6 for 1 GiB and $12 for 2 GiB. From 1 January 2026 Droplets moved to per-second billing with a minimum of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher. Managed Kubernetes starts at $12/mo with a free control plane, App Platform starts at $0 per month, GPU Droplets are quoted at $1.91 per GPU-hour on contract and on-demand from $0.76, and Cloudways managed hosting sits at $11/mo. Everything is listed on one page in dollars per month.
The difference is not really price — both will happily bill you single-digit dollars for a small machine. It is how much of the stack each one is willing to own. AWS will give you a dozen ways to run the same workload and charge for each component, which rewards people who know which combination they want. DigitalOcean gives you a Droplet, a load balancer, a database, a Kubernetes cluster and a few adjacent products, which rewards people who want to ship without an architecture review.
| Feature | AWS | DigitalOcean |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest VM | t4g.micro $0.0084/hr (2 vCPU, 1 GiB, us-east-1 Linux) | 512 MiB Droplet $4.00/mo ($0.00595/hr), 1 vCPU |
| Next size up | t3.micro $0.0104/hr; t2.micro $0.0116/hr | 1 GiB $6.00/mo; 2 GiB $12.00/mo; 2 GiB + 2 vCPU $18.00/mo |
| Billing unit | Per second, per resource | Per second from 1 Jan 2026, 60-second or $0.01 minimum |
| Free offering | 30-plus services within monthly limits, up to $200 credit | App Platform starts at $0/mo, and Droplet pricing is published without a sales call |
| Managed Kubernetes | Control plane billed per hour, worker nodes billed separately | From $12/mo with a free control plane |
| Breadth | 240-plus services including databases, storage, queues and IAM | Droplets, Kubernetes, App Platform, databases, load balancers, GPU |
| GPU compute | Priced per accelerator-hour by family | $1.91/GPU-hr on contract, on-demand from $0.76/GPU-hr |
Pick AWS if
If the project will grow into managed databases, containers, queues, private networking and formal compliance, start on AWS rather than migrating later. The per-second rates are competitive at the small end — a t3.micro is $0.0104/hr — and the cost you actually need to estimate is the surrounding architecture, not the instance.
Pick DigitalOcean if
For a first production box, a client site, a staging environment or a straightforward Kubernetes cluster, DigitalOcean's published shapes and $4 entry point are easier to reason about and cheaper to keep tidy. You are trading catalogue depth for clarity, and for most small teams that trade pays.
No independent reviews, ratings or user quotes were collected for this page, so none appear above. Every figure and claim comes from the vendors' own pricing and product pages as retrieved for this article.
At the smallest sizes they are close. DigitalOcean lists a 512 MiB Droplet at $4.00/mo, while AWS lists t4g.micro at $0.0084/hr in us-east-1 on Linux. The gap appears in the surrounding resources — storage, load balancing, data transfer and backups — which are itemised separately on both platforms.
Yes, from 1 January 2026 Droplets use per-second billing with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher. AWS has billed EC2 Linux instances per second for considerably longer.
AWS, by a wide margin: the company counts more than 240 services in its portfolio, against a deliberately small set of products at DigitalOcean. More services means more options and a larger bill to forecast.
Yes, and it is a common path. Both run standard Linux images, so the work is re-creating networking, storage and managed-database equivalents rather than porting the application.
DigitalOcean and AWS both meter database instances separately from compute, based on size and hours. Because neither publishes a single universal price for every engine and region, price the specific shape you need on each vendor's calculator before committing.
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