DigitalOcean Kubernetes (DOKS) Pricing

DOKS follows DigitalOcean's simple, flat-rate pricing. The control plane is completely free -- no per-hour charges, no cluster management fees. You only pay for worker nodes (standard Droplet pricing), load balancers, and block storage. This makes DOKS significantly cheaper than EKS ($0.10/hr = ~$73/mo per cluster) and GKE Standard ($0.10/hr), especially for dev/staging clusters.

Worker Nodes (standard Droplet pricing): Basic from $4/mo, General Purpose from $42/mo, GPU Droplets available. Load Balancers: $12/mo each (needed to expose services externally). Block Storage: $10/mo for 10GiB (Linux), expandable to 16TiB via CSI driver. Bandwidth: Included per worker node. Overage: $0.01/GiB. Free VPC-internal and ingress traffic. Container Registry: Free tier (1 repo, 500 MiB), paid from $5/mo.

DOKS (1 cluster, 3x $24/mo workers + 1 LB): $84/mo total (free CP) EKS (same workers + LB): ~$133/mo total (CP $73/mo + EC2 + LB) GKE Standard: ~$120/mo total (CP $73/mo + workers + LB) GKE Autopilot: Per-pod pricing -- can be cheaper for bursty workloads.

DOKS savings compound significantly when running multiple clusters (dev, staging, prod, QA).