Cheaper DigitalOcean Droplets alternatives
Pricing data as of 2026-06-09 · refreshed weekly
Baseline: a Next.js app with startup-level traffic (~50,000 visits/month) costs $4/month on DigitalOcean Droplets (Basic 512MB). Every provider below can run the same workload — ranked by real list price. Cheaper is not always better: a vps platform and a raw VPS differ in how much ops work lands on you.
| Provider | Type | Plan | $/month | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | serverless | Hobby | $0 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Vercel → |
| Koyeb | paas | eco-micro | $2.7 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Koyeb → |
| Fly.io | paas | shared-cpu-1x 512MB | $3.32 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Fly.io → |
| Hetzner Cloud | vps | CX23 | $4.3 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Hetzner Cloud → |
| Vultr | vps | Cloud Compute 1GB | $5 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Vultr → |
| Railway | paas | Hobby | $5 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Railway → |
| Linode (Akamai) | vps | Nanode 1GB | $5 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Linode (Akamai) → |
| AWS Lightsail | vps | $5 bundle | $5 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs AWS Lightsail → |
| Heroku | paas | Eco | $5 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Heroku → |
| Netcup | vps | VPS 500 G12 | $6.4 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Netcup → |
| OVHcloud VPS | vps | VPS-1 | $6.46 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs OVHcloud VPS → |
| Hostinger VPS | vps | KVM 1 | $6.49 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Hostinger VPS → |
| Render | paas | Starter | $7 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Render → |
| Scaleway | vps | DEV1-S | $7.1 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Scaleway → |
| Netlify | serverless | Pro | $20 | DigitalOcean Droplets vs Netlify → |