Compare 6 free alternatives to DigitalOcean for Cloud IaaS. Every one of their free tier limits side by side, with the read and catalogue dates we hold.

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Best DigitalOcean Alternatives with Free Tiers (2026)

6 free alternatives in Cloud IaaS, Startup Perks. Sorted by pricing stability.

Current DigitalOcean Situation

Risk Level: stable
Category: Cloud IaaS Startup Perks
Pricing Page: www.digitalocean.com/pricing

Recent Pricing Changes (4)

restricted effective 2026-05-13 medium impact
As of 2026-05-13, DigitalOcean's startup credits exclude Dedicated and Serverless Inference, third-party AI models, Paperspace Machines, Cloudways and Bare Metal GPUs as well as GPU Droplets and H100 GPU products, the two exclusions its page stated before. The page also now puts the monthly credit limit at $10,000; its April capture mentioned a monthly limit without an amount. Source ↗
reduced effective 2026-04-07 medium impact
DigitalOcean's new-account credit fell from $200 for 60 days to $5 for 90 days. Its pricing page changed between the Internet Archive's 2026-04-05 and 2026-04-07 captures. The $200 offer page (try.digitalocean.com/freetrialoffer/) was still up on 2026-05-15 and now redirects to the homepage. Source ↗
increased effective 2026-01-01 medium impact
Droplets moved from hourly to per-second billing (with a minimum charge of 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is higher) Source ↗
increased effective 2025-01-22 medium impact
Hatch startup program expanded to up to $100K compute credits plus up to 3 months free H100 GPU access for AI/ML startups Source ↗

See DigitalOcean's full history →

📖 In-depth migration guide available

Read our detailed DigitalOcean Free Tier Complete Guide 2026 guide with curated recommendations and service comparison.

Recommended Migration Targets

These alternatives were identified from DigitalOcean’s pricing changes as recommended replacements.

Supabase stable recommended
Free
Postgres development platform: database, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions. The Free plan is $0: unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly active users, a 500 MB database on a shared CPU with 500 MB RAM, 5 GB egress plus 5 GB cached egress, 1 GB file storage, 500,000 Edge Function…
Databases Read and confirmed 2026-11-02
Profile
Neon stable recommended
Free
Serverless Postgres with branching — free tier includes 100 CU-hours/month per project, 1 GB of Postgres storage per project (20 GB total across all projects), 5 GB of public network transfer per project per month, up to 100 projects, 10 branches per project, Neon Auth (60K MAU), auto-scaling up to…
Databases Read and confirmed 2026-10-28
Profile
Vultr recommended
Free
Free Tier Program: a free cloud instance (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD, IPv4 address) in Miami, Seattle or Frankfurt, for applicants Vultr admits. Vultr calls it early access in limited quantities and admits eligible applicants at random, weighted by a score built from what they say about…
Cloud IaaS Read 2026-10-06 · tried again 2026-11-01 and did not read the page
Profile Compare
−1 stale_verification We cannot confirm this offer: 1 consecutive re-check attempt has failed (most recently 2026-11-01 — HTTP 403), never confirmed since it was indexed. This is our inability to verify, not a change by the vendor.
AWS Activate recommended
Startup Credits
Founders: $1,000 to $5,000 in AWS credits for self-funded startups. Portfolio: up to $200,000 for startups with an Activate Provider Org ID.
Startup Perks Read 2026-11-03 · confirmed 2026-10-08
Profile
eligibility_restricted Restricted to accelerator (AWS Activate Portfolio) applicants — not generally available.
Hetzner recommended
Paid
Budget cloud VMs, no free tier. As of 2026-10-07 hetzner.com marks every Cost-Optimized plan — CX23, CX33, CX43, CX53 and the Arm CAX11–CAX41 — "not available".
Infrastructure Read 2026-11-12 · catalogue date 2026-09-04
Profile
not_a_free_offer Tier "Paid" is no free offer at all.
PlanetScale recommended
Retired
Managed MySQL, Postgres and Vitess, formerly a serverless MySQL with a free Hobby plan. No free tier.
Databases Read and confirmed 2026-11-05
Profile
offer_retired PlanetScale's offer is recorded as Retired.

All Free Alternatives (6)

2 of these carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold; their order rotates daily. 1 are demoted with the reason named, and 3 are listed last because they are not generally available or are not a free offer. How we rank.

Supabase stable
Free
Postgres development platform: database, Auth, Storage, Realtime and Edge Functions. The Free plan is $0: unlimited API requests, 50,000 monthly active users, a 500 MB database on a shared CPU with 500 MB RAM, 5 GB egress plus 5 GB cached egress, 1 GB file storage, 500,000 Edge Function…
Databases Read and confirmed 2026-11-02
Profile
Neon stable
Free
Serverless Postgres with branching — free tier includes 100 CU-hours/month per project, 1 GB of Postgres storage per project (20 GB total across all projects), 5 GB of public network transfer per project per month, up to 100 projects, 10 branches per project, Neon Auth (60K MAU), auto-scaling up to…
Databases Read and confirmed 2026-10-28
Profile
Vultr
Free
Free Tier Program: a free cloud instance (1 vCPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD, IPv4 address) in Miami, Seattle or Frankfurt, for applicants Vultr admits. Vultr calls it early access in limited quantities and admits eligible applicants at random, weighted by a score built from what they say about…
Cloud IaaS Read 2026-10-06 · tried again 2026-11-01 and did not read the page
Profile Compare
−1 stale_verification We cannot confirm this offer: 1 consecutive re-check attempt has failed (most recently 2026-11-01 — HTTP 403), never confirmed since it was indexed. This is our inability to verify, not a change by the vendor.
AWS Activate
Startup Credits
Founders: $1,000 to $5,000 in AWS credits for self-funded startups. Portfolio: up to $200,000 for startups with an Activate Provider Org ID.
Startup Perks Read 2026-11-03 · confirmed 2026-10-08
Profile
eligibility_restricted Restricted to accelerator (AWS Activate Portfolio) applicants — not generally available.
Hetzner
Paid
Budget cloud VMs, no free tier. As of 2026-10-07 hetzner.com marks every Cost-Optimized plan — CX23, CX33, CX43, CX53 and the Arm CAX11–CAX41 — "not available".
Infrastructure Read 2026-11-12 · catalogue date 2026-09-04
Profile
not_a_free_offer Tier "Paid" is no free offer at all.
PlanetScale
Retired
Managed MySQL, Postgres and Vitess, formerly a serverless MySQL with a free Hobby plan. No free tier.
Databases Read and confirmed 2026-11-05
Profile
offer_retired PlanetScale's offer is recorded as Retired.
Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.
date
2026-11-14
query_key
alternative-to:DigitalOcean
seed
85d5d631824cae4dcc5f1cf749caa4d2fccfbd329cca417a9e07fdebb87de6ee
tie_count
2

Category Trends

See the broader pricing landscape for these categories.

↑ Cloud IaaS Pricing Trends ↑ Startup Perks Pricing Trends

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best free alternatives to DigitalOcean?
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 6 free alternatives to DigitalOcean, each listed below with its tier, category and the read and catalogue dates we hold. Of those, 2 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 1 is demoted with the reason named, 3 are listed last behind a stated gate. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
Is DigitalOcean's free tier still available?
No. What DigitalOcean offers is a credit grant that runs out (Credits). One recorded limit reduction narrowed the terms, on 2026-04-07.
How many free alternatives to DigitalOcean exist?
There are 6 free alternatives to DigitalOcean tracked on AgentDeals across the Cloud IaaS, Startup Perks, Databases, Infrastructure categories.
Has DigitalOcean changed their pricing?
DigitalOcean has 4 recorded pricing changes. The most recent was on 2026-05-13: As of 2026-05-13, DigitalOcean's startup credits exclude Dedicated and Serverless Inference, third-party AI models, Paperspace Machines, Cloudways and Bare Metal GPUs as well as GPU Droplets and H100 GPU products, the two exclusions its page stated before. The page also now puts the monthly credit limit at $10,000; its April capture mentioned a monthly limit without an amount. Source: https://www.digitalocean.com/startups