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Best DigitalOcean offer right now $400 CREDIT$400 infrastructure credit for accounts with 6+ months historyClaim CreditsSee all 5 offers
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DigitalOcean free credits, trials and programs for November 2026
We may earn a commission when you sign up through links here. It never changes what you pay. Details
DigitalOcean does not issue public promo codes. DigitalOcean doesn’t publish public promo codes. The signup credit needs no code, and promotional credit terms allow each code to be redeemed once on one account. Real credits come from the automatic signup credit, referrals, the Startups program and event-specific codes handed out at conferences. A code from a coupon site is almost always one of those, already used.
$400 in DigitalOcean creditsVerified todayEnds Mar 31
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Who qualifies: Accounts active for 6+ months with at least $100 in cumulative spend
DigitalOcean rewards loyal customers with a $400 infrastructure credit. The credit covers Droplets, Kubernetes, App Platform, Managed Databases, Spaces, GPU Droplets and all other products. Activate through your team billing dashboard.
Credit expires 6 months after issue. One grant per team. Does not apply to Marketplace add-ons or domain registrations.
$1,250 in DigitalOcean credits for top-tier usersExclusiveVerified todayEnds Jun 30
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Who qualifies: Teams with $250+ lifetime spend, active for 6+ months
DigitalOcean's premier loyalty tier grants $1,250 in credits to high-value accounts. The credit covers all services including GPU Droplets for AI inference, Kubernetes clusters, managed PostgreSQL and Redis, and App Platform deployments.
One-time award per qualifying team. Credit expires 6 months after activation. Not valid for Marketplace add-ons.
25% discount on GPU Droplet hourly ratesVerified todayEnds Mar 31
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Who qualifies: Accounts with 6+ months history running at least one GPU Droplet
GPU-powered teams get 25% off all GPU Droplet sizes. The discount applies to NVIDIA H100 and A100 configurations for inference, training and fine-tuning workloads. It stacks with reserved pricing for even deeper savings.
Applies to on-demand GPU Droplets only. Does not cover Droplet snapshots or bandwidth overages. Minimum 6 months account history required.
$350 for DigitalOcean Kubernetes and container registryVerified todayEnds Mar 31
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Who qualifies: Accounts running DOKS clusters for 6+ consecutive months
Container teams receive a $350 credit toward DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) and Container Registry. The credit covers control plane, worker node compute, load balancers and persistent volume storage.
Credit applies to DOKS and Container Registry only. Minimum 6 months of active cluster history. One grant per team.
$300 one-time migration creditExclusiveVerified todayEnds Jun 30
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Who qualifies: Organizations with verifiable cloud spend of $100+ at AWS, Azure or GCP in the past 90 days
Migrate to DigitalOcean's simpler cloud with a $300 credit. The migration team offers free 1:1 migration assistance including Droplet provisioning, DNS cutover and managed database import. Submit your current provider's billing summary to qualify.
Billing proof from another cloud required. One migration credit per team. Free migration assistance subject to availability.
Startups that raised $10 million or less, with a company website and matching corporate email, on a new team account with a card. Service businesses excluded. Applications paused until early 2027.
Applied automatically when you create your first team. Covers all products except SaaS Add-Ons. A valid payment method is still required before you can create a Droplet.
Any DigitalOcean user with an account can share a referral link. The $25 is paid after the referred account reaches $25 in billings. The page no longer states a credit for the new user.
3 static sites and 90,000 GiB-seconds per month free
Every account, including existing ones. Static sites on App Platform and Functions compute inside the monthly allowance cost nothing. Usage above the allowance is billed at list price.
Teams willing to sign a 12-month contract through sales. Rates are locked for the term; renewals move to the reserved rate in force at that time.
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Free tier that matters
$5 signup credit on your first team, gone after 90 days
3 static sites on App Platform at $0 per month
90,000 GiB-seconds of Functions compute per month, no invocation charge
500 GiB of outbound transfer bundled with the smallest Droplet
1 container registry repository with 500 MiB of storage
Cloud firewalls, DNS management and VPC traffic at no charge
Recent program changes
Spend alerts can now pause an inference key at budget DigitalOcean’s inference release notes say spend alerts can be set on Serverless Inference model access keys, with an option to pause the key when spend reaches 100% of its budget. It’s the first hard cap on the platform. Source
Prepaid Inference and Agents balance adds auto-reload The billing release notes say Serverless Inference and Managed Agents are now funded from a separate Inference and Agents balance that you can prepay and set to reload automatically, keeping model calls off the monthly invoice. Source
GPU Droplet prices rise on select GPUs from August 1 A DigitalOcean blog post announced new on-demand and 12-month reserved prices for select NVIDIA and AMD GPU Droplets effective August 1, 2026. Customers with locked-rate contracts keep their rate until renewal. Source
Serverless inference now requires a prepaid balance The inference release notes state that Serverless Inference now requires a positive prepaid account balance before requests are accepted, and that access is suspended when the balance reaches $0. Source
DigitalOcean no longer advertises a large new-account trial. The official referral page promises the referrer $25 after a referred account spends $25, and says nothing about a credit for the new user. There’s one automatic credit: $5 on your first team, expiring 90 days after signup. Third-party coupon pages still quote $200 for 60 days, and that figure doesn’t appear on any digitalocean.com page today.
The bigger money sits in the Startups program, which replaced Hatch on May 11, 2026. Accepted companies get 12 months of credits with a monthly cap that’s generally $10,000, free Standard support for 15 months and partner perks. The catch is timing. Applications are paused while DigitalOcean prepares an updated program for early 2027, so right now you can prepare but not apply.
Serverless inference has run on a separate prepaid balance since June 29, 2026, so core credits don’t stretch to model calls, GPU Droplets or third-party models such as Claude or GPT. What runs out first on most new accounts is the $5 credit, usually within a week of running a single $4 Droplet plus a managed database.
How to claim DigitalOcean credits
Sign up with a referral linkOpen the signup page from a referral link or the plain Sign up button. Register with email, Google or GitHub. The first team you create gets the $5 signup credit automatically, shown as Signup Credit in the top navigation bar.
Add a payment methodGo to Billing, open the Payment Methods section and click Add payment method. Choose Card, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, US bank account or Crypto. A card preauthorization may sit on your statement for up to 7 days without a charge, so don’t panic.
Check the credit balanceThe Signup Credit figure in the control panel header drops as resources accrue charges. Promotional credits never apply to Marketplace purchases, paid Support plans or sales tax, so those lines bill straight to your card.
Create a spend alertOn the Billing page open the Spend alerts tab and click Create alert. Set a monthly budget amount and threshold percentages. Owners and billers get an email within an hour of crossing a threshold. Alerts don’t stop resources, they just warn you.
Fund inference separatelyServerless Inference and Managed Agents draw from an Inference and Agents balance that must be positive before requests succeed. Top it up from Billing and turn on auto-reload if agents run unattended, or they’ll stop at $0.
Share your own referral linkAfter signup, click Get your referral link on the referral page or open Referrals under your account. Each referred account that reaches $25 in billings earns you $25 in credit, not cash.
Ways to stretch your DigitalOcean credits
Destroy, do not power off
A powered-off Droplet still bills, and the same goes for GPU Droplets until they’re destroyed. Snapshot anything you want to keep, then destroy the resource. Snapshots cost far less per month than an idle Droplet, and you can rebuild from one in minutes. An H100 left powered off over a weekend costs more than $200.
Use per-second billing for bursts
Since January 1, 2026 CPU Droplets bill per second with a 60-second minimum or $0.01, whichever is higher. GPU Droplets bill per second with a 5-minute minimum. Short CI runs or batch jobs that spin up a large Droplet for ten minutes cost cents, so stop sizing for peak all month.
Reserve GPUs for steady training
On-demand H100 time is $4.41 per GPU hour, while the 12-month reserved rate is $3.26, a 26% cut. MI300X drops from $2.59 to $1.91. Reserve only what runs around the clock and keep experiments on demand, where the 5-minute minimum keeps idle costs low. A reserved card you use half the time costs more than on-demand.
Try spot GPUs for interruptible work
Spot GPU Droplets entered public preview on August 10, 2026. B300 runs $6.17 versus $7.94 reserved and MI350X $3.00 versus $4.76. Droplets can be reclaimed with a goal of 2 hours notice, so checkpoint often and keep datasets on Spaces. Training runs that can resume from a checkpoint are the ideal fit.
Batch inference on OpenAI and Claude
Batch jobs on OpenAI and Anthropic models get up to 50% off, with only completed requests charged. Evaluations, nightly summaries and backfills belong in batch. Combine it with prompt caching, which has carried no cache-write charge on DigitalOcean-hosted models since October 8, 2026, and a long system prompt stops being the expensive part.
Pick the open models for routine calls
gpt-oss-20b costs $0.05 input and $0.45 output per million tokens, and DeepSeek V4 Flash costs $0.14 and $0.28. Claude Sonnet 4.6 on the same price list costs $3 and $15, sixty times more on input. Route classification and extraction to the cheap tier and save frontier models for reasoning.
Keep static sites on App Platform
Three static sites cost $0 per month on App Platform, and Functions includes 90,000 GiB-seconds monthly with no invocation fee. A marketing site, docs and a small webhook handler fit inside that allowance, which leaves your $5 credit and your card for the database.
DigitalOcean billing, explained
DigitalOcean invoices on the first day of each month for the previous month and charges the primary payment method at the same time. If your running balance hits the auto-charge amount for your tier mid-month, the charge happens then. The $5 signup credit offsets eligible usage first, and anything above the remaining credit bills to your card. Credits can’t be applied to sales tax, Marketplace add-ons or paid Support.
A payment method is required before you create your first Droplet. Cards get a preauthorization that can show for up to 7 days without a charge. PayPal carries a $5 authorization, and a crypto wallet carries a one-time $25 authorization that’s applied as a credit against future charges. Virtual, electron and prepaid cards are refused, which is where most student signups fail.
Serverless inference doesn’t use your monthly invoice at all. Since June 29, 2026 it needs a positive prepaid Inference and Agents balance, and access is suspended when that balance reaches $0. Program credits labeled core also exclude GPU Droplets, Bare Metal GPUs and third-party hosted models, so a Startups award mostly pays for Droplets, Kubernetes, databases and storage.
DigitalOcean credits FAQ
does digitalocean still give $200 free credit for new accounts
Not on any official page. The referral program page now states only that the referrer earns $25 after the referred account spends $25, and the only automatic credit is $5 on your first team, expiring after 90 days. The $200 for 60 days figure survives on coupon sites and in old community threads, so treat it as unverified until DigitalOcean publishes it again.
how long does the digitalocean signup credit last
The $5 signup credit expires 90 days after you sign up. It’s applied automatically to the first team you create, covers every product except SaaS Add-Ons, and can’t be moved to another team. Unused credit is forfeited at the 90-day mark and isn’t refunded, so spend it on something.
do i need a credit card to use digitalocean
Yes. You need a valid payment method before you can create Droplets or other resources, even with the signup credit in place. Cards, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Alipay, Link, US bank accounts via ACH and stablecoin wallets are accepted. Prepaid, virtual and electron cards aren’t, so a disposable card number gets rejected at verification.
is the digitalocean hatch program still open
Hatch was renamed the DigitalOcean Startups program, with terms last updated May 11, 2026, and applications are paused until an updated program launches in early 2027. Existing members keep their credits and perks for their original term. If you qualify (raised $10 million or less, company website, corporate email), set up the team account now and email [email protected] about partner access.
what do digitalocean startup credits cover
Core credits cover most DigitalOcean services for 12 months, generally capped at $10,000 of usage per month. They exclude GPU Droplets, H100 Kubernetes, Bare Metal GPUs, Dedicated and Serverless Inference, third-party models such as Claude and GPT, Paperspace and Cloudways. GPU credits are a separate award granted after a review. Unused credits are forfeited at the end of the term and there are no extensions.
how does the digitalocean referral program pay out
You receive $25 in account credit after a person who signed up through your link reaches $25 in billings. The credit has no cash value, can’t be withdrawn and only offsets your own DigitalOcean charges. Any user with an account can generate a link by clicking Get your referral link, which opens the Referrals page in the control panel.
does digitalocean have a free tier
There’s no permanent free compute tier for Droplets. The free allowances that exist are 3 static sites on App Platform, 90,000 GiB-seconds of Functions compute per month, outbound transfer bundled with each Droplet starting at 500 GiB, one container registry repository with 500 MiB, cloud firewalls, DNS and VPC traffic. Everything else bills per second from the first minute.
is digitalocean in the github student developer pack
Not right now. The GitHub Student Developer Pack doesn’t list DigitalOcean, and the digitalocean.com/github-students page carries only generic Sign up buttons. Students can still use the $5 signup credit and the App Platform and Functions allowances, but there’s no student-specific credit to claim.
$400 CREDIT$400 infrastructure credit for accounts with 6+ months history
