DigitalOcean Startups
- Free allowance
- 12 months of DigitalOcean credits for accepted startups.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- write-gatedA program manager decides the award and the amount stays unnamed until the onboarding email, so an applicant cannot plan against a number; the one-year expiry and the USD 10,000 monthly ceiling bind after that.
- Evidence
- documented10 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-05checked 2026-11-04 (live); stale on 2026-12-05
| Free tier | 12 months of DigitalOcean credits for accepted startups. Eligibility: must have raised USD 10m or less, must have a company website and an email address on that domain, and must create a registered DigitalOcean team account with a business email. Applicants with no VC, incubator or accelerator apply by selecting Other for the partner field. Participants are generally entitled to a USD 10,000 monthly limit, with charges applying above it. unit none; metered on wall-clock; one-shot-credit |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
|
| Identity | email The published criteria ask for a company website, a domain email and a registered team account, and provide an explicit route for applicants with no partner organization. No incorporation certificate is named on the program page. The credit amount is set by the partner, not by the applicant. |
| Egress | not published on the startup program page; the credits pay for ordinary DigitalOcean products, whose Droplet terms are: free outbound transfer included per plan from 500 GiB a month, then $0.01 per GiB; inbound is free free allowance: 500 GiB a month on the smallest Droplet price per tb: USD 0.01 per GiB |
| Interface | rest, cli REST API (HTTP requests) and the doctl CLI, both documented at docs.digitalocean.com/reference |
| Tooling | doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI; the REST API reference has request samples in cURL, Python, Go and Ruby |
| Composes with | The core credits exclude every GPU product, so the value is CPU droplets, Spaces and managed databases: at a USD 10,000 monthly limit a small always-on stack runs for a year. GPU access is a separate application and is not covered, which is where the chain breaks for ML work. |
| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
| Notes | The credit amount is genuinely not published: the page says DigitalOcean awards credits through partners and directs the applicant to a program manager. Recording a dollar ceiling here would be invention, so the ceiling is null and the monthly limit of USD 10,000 is what the page states. One directory reported a USD 100K figure from a 2024 press release, which the current page supersedes. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 10
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | www.digitalocean.com/startups | eligibility is USD 10m or less raised, a company website with an email on that domain, and a registered team account on a business email, quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | www.digitalocean.com/startups | 'Please fill out the application here and select Other when prompted for an affiliated partner organization', the no-VC route, quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | www.digitalocean.com/startups | 'Participants generally are entitled to a USD 10,000 monthly limit (and charges apply for any use in a month exceeding this amount)', quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | www.digitalocean.com/startups | GPU Droplets, H100 GPU Kubernetes, Bare Metal GPUs, Dedicated Inference and Serverless Inference are excluded from core credits as of 2026-05-13, quoted |
| 2026-11-03 | docs.digitalocean.com/platform/billing/bandwidth/ | Droplets include free outbound transfer and the overage is $0.01 per GiB |
| 2026-11-03 | www.digitalocean.com/pricing/droplets | the smallest Droplet includes 500 GiB of outbound transfer a month |
| 2026-11-03 | docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/ | a REST API exists |
| 2026-11-03 | docs.digitalocean.com/reference/doctl/ | an official CLI exists |
| 2026-11-04 | docs.digitalocean.com/reference/api/ | REST API with samples in cURL, Python, Go and Ruby |
| 2026-11-04 | docs.digitalocean.com/reference/doctl/ | doctl is the official CLI |
More fields 1
| facets | {"class": "startup-credit","free_tier_kind": "one-shot-credit","shape": null} |
|---|
Unknown values 4
- egress metered: egress metering was not published
- per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- reliability note: nothing of this kind was observed
- retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer