DigitalOcean doesn’t try to win the trial contest. A new account gets a $5 signup credit that expires 90 days after you create your first team, and a referral program that pays the referrer $25 once the new user spends $25. Five dollars is less than one month of the cheapest Droplet. AWS, by contrast, puts up to $200 of Free Tier credits in front of every new account, $100 at sign-up and $100 for five onboarding tasks, valid for 6 months on the Free plan.
What DigitalOcean sells instead is a price you can predict. A Basic Droplet with 1 GiB of memory, 1 vCPU, a 25 GiB SSD and 1,000 GiB of outbound transfer is $6 a month, period. A t3.micro on AWS costs a similar $7.59 a month, before you add a disk or send a byte out. Figures checked on both providers’ own pages on November 2, 2026. We earn a commission if you sign up through our links. It does not change your price.
Five dollars against two hundred
DigitalOcean keeps it short. When you create your first team, a $5 credit lands automatically, no promo code needed. It expires 90 days after signup, applies to every product except SaaS Add-Ons, and can’t be transferred to another team. You must add a valid payment method before you can create Droplets or any other resource. For years DigitalOcean also ran a $200 for 60 days offer through partner links, but that offer is no longer in its published billing terms, so we don’t list it.
AWS gives $100 the moment the account exists and $20 each for five tasks: launching an EC2 instance, configuring RDS, building a Lambda function, prompting Bedrock, and setting a Budget. On the Free plan the account closes after 6 months or when credits are exhausted, with data kept for 90 days. Most new customers don’t need a payment method, which is the exact opposite of the DigitalOcean rule. Forty times the credit, and no card. That’s the AWS pitch.
What a small server really costs
DigitalOcean lists Basic Droplets on a single table. The $4 plan has 512 MiB, 1 vCPU, a 10 GiB SSD and 500 GiB of transfer. The $6 plan has 1 GiB, 1 vCPU, 25 GiB of SSD and 1,000 GiB of transfer, billed at $0.00893 an hour. The $24 plan has 4 GiB, 2 vCPUs, 80 GiB and 4,000 GiB of transfer. Every number includes the disk and the outbound bandwidth, and transfer allowances pool across all Droplets on the team.
AWS on-demand rates for N. Virginia list t3.micro with 2 vCPUs and 1 GiB at $0.0104 an hour, t4g.micro at $0.0084, and t3.medium with 4 GiB at $0.0416, which is about $30.37 a month against the $24 Droplet. Those prices exclude the EBS root volume and data transfer out, which AWS bills separately. Burstable T instances also bill CPU credits in Unlimited mode at $0.05 per vCPU-hour above the baseline. The DigitalOcean price is usually the price. The AWS price is a starting point.
Bandwidth is the line item that gets you
DigitalOcean includes outbound transfer with each Droplet, pooled at the team level, with overage at $0.01 per GiB. Inbound transfer is free. A team with three $6 Droplets gets 3,000 GiB of outbound transfer a month before paying anything, which covers most content sites and APIs comfortably. App Platform overage is $0.02 per GiB and Spaces object storage overage is $0.01.
AWS prices internet data transfer out by the GB on a tiered schedule that depends on region and service, and those rates don’t render as plain text on the EC2 price list, so we don’t quote them. What we can say is that AWS doesn’t bundle a transfer allowance with an instance the way DigitalOcean does. If your app serves video, downloads or large API responses, run the numbers in the AWS Pricing Calculator before assuming the compute price is the whole bill. It rarely is.
Startup credits you can actually apply for
DigitalOcean Hatch is on hold. Applications for the current cohort are paused while DigitalOcean prepares an updated program for early 2027. The published terms give accepted startups 12 months of credits, a $10,000 monthly usage limit, free Standard support for 15 months, and partner perks such as 20% off Stripe Atlas. Eligibility requires $10m or less raised, a corporate email on your own domain, and no prior DigitalOcean credits. GPU Droplets and third-party models are excluded from the core credits.
AWS Activate is open and tiered. Self-funded founders get $1,000, rising to $5,000 for select companies. Startups with an Activate Provider Organization ID can request up to $200,000 if they’re pre-Series B, founded within 10 years, and on a Paid plan account. An invite-only AI tier goes beyond $200,000. Credits usually expire within one to two years and cover more than 200 services, including third-party models on Bedrock and eligible support plans, but not Professional Services or Training.
How the first invoice arrives
DigitalOcean invoices and charges your primary payment method on the first day of each month for the previous month, and can charge mid-month when your balance reaches a tier threshold. It accepts credit and debit cards, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, bank accounts and crypto wallets, with PayPal requiring prepayment. Each team is billed separately, and a support plan bought on one team doesn’t cover another.
AWS bills monthly in arrears, applies credits before charging the card, and on a Free plan simply can’t charge you until you upgrade. The cost of that safety is losing access to a subset of services, including Reserved Instances and some Marketplace products, and losing promotional credit eligibility. Upgrading to the Paid plan keeps remaining credits for 12 months from sign-up. Set an AWS Budget early. It’s one of the five credit-earning tasks and also your only early warning.
Who answers when something breaks
DigitalOcean support plans are flat and cheap. Starter is free with a response under 24 hours, Developer is $24 a month with a response under 8 hours, Standard is $99 with under 2 hours, and Premium is $999 with under 30 minutes. Every customer gets ticket-based support for free. AWS Basic is also free, but technical case support starts at Business Support+, which is the greater of $29 a month per account or 9% of the first $10K of charges, stepping down to 3% above $250K. On a $1,000 bill that’s $90 versus $24 for a comparable response window, and the gap only grows.
The winner: AWS
AWS takes this on credits and on breadth. Up to $200 against $5, a live startup program against a paused one, no payment method for most new accounts, and a catalog that DigitalOcean doesn’t attempt to match. DigitalOcean wins the long-run bill for a small team, with bundled bandwidth, a $6 server and $24 support, and that matters more once credits are gone.
Choose DigitalOcean if you run a web app or API on a handful of servers, serve a lot of outbound traffic, and want a bill that equals the published price.
DigitalOcean offers (4)Choose AWS if you want $200 to experiment with, need managed services DigitalOcean doesn’t offer, or can apply for Activate through an accelerator or investor.
AWS offers (5)