Announcing per-sec billing, new Droplet plans, BYOIP, and NAT gateway preview to reduce scaling costs

Announcing per-sec billing, new Droplet plans, BYOIP, and NAT gateway preview to reduce scaling costs Droplets per-second billing slashes costs for ephemeral workloads New dedicated Droplet plans for a seamless performance upgrade Bring your own IP (BYOIP) to protect your IP reputation VPC Network Address Translation (NAT) gateway preview for centralized egress and static IPs About the author(s) Try DigitalOcean for free Related Articles Announcing cost-efficient storage with Network file storage, cold storage, and usage-based backups Storage that thinks for itself: Introducing Storage autoscaling, the newest feature for Managed Databases Introducing DigitalOcean Organizations, a new and comprehensive account layer By Anantha Ramachandran and Nihar Namjoshi Updated: September 24, 2025 7 min read To help users cut down on cloud spending that’s wasted due to over-provisioning and inflexible billing models, we’re introducing tools that offer granular control without sacrificing simplicity or cost-effectiveness. We’re excited to announce new product updates that offer granular cost control, improved performance, and a clear path to savings. TL;DR Per-second billing for Droplets begins January 1, 2026 to slash costs for ephemeral workloads. Read documentation to learn more and understand your current billing details in the DigitalOcean console to prepare for this change New dedicated Droplet plans are now generally available for a seamless performance upgrade. Visit your DigitalOcean console to create these new Droplets. Bring your own IP is now generally available to protect your IP reputation. Check out our documentation or visit your DigitalOcean console to bring your own ip. VPC NAT gateway is now available for public preview for centralized egress and static IPs. Check out our documentation or visit your DigitalOcean console to set up your NAT gateway. Traditional hourly billing models for virtual machines have resulted in customers paying for idle time, even for short-lived workloads. Effective Jan 1, 2026, our billing model will transition to a per-second basis for Droplets , with a minimum charge of 60 seconds. This new approach aims to optimize cost control by charging for exact usage over a minute, making it simple to get precise billing for your actual usage.