DigitalOcean $4 vs $6 vs $12 droplet: what each one can actually run

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DigitalOcean's three cheapest droplets are two dollars apart in price and a long way apart in what they can run. We read the pricing page on 11 Oct 2026 and put it next to what we have measured on our own $6 droplet since 1 October.

The prices (pricing page, read 11 Oct 2026)

Prices are in USD, billed hourly up to the monthly cap. Premium Intel and Premium AMD variants of the same sizes cost more and the page lists them separately; this piece is about the Regular line. Backups and snapshots are extra.

What we measured on the $6 droplet

All numbers are from our test server coolify-test (FRA1, Ubuntu 24.04, 961 MB usable RAM, 2 GB swap file), each with its own write-up:

$4, 512 MiB: one job at a time

We have not run the $4 plan ourselves, so this is arithmetic on our own measurements rather than a test. Coolify alone needed 618 MB for the whole machine at idle, which is more than the plan has before any app starts; Coolify's documentation asks for 2 GB. What fits: a static site served by Caddy or nginx (tens of MB), a single small Go or Node service, an Uptime Kuma instance on its own (46 MB in RAM plus 119 MB in swap on our box after five days), a cron box. Add a 1 GB swap file anyway, because apt upgrade and Docker image pulls spike. If the plan is "one container and nothing else", this is the right price.

$6, 1 GiB: Coolify and two or three small apps

This is the plan we run and the one most of this site's measurements come from. The rule from ten days of numbers: it works as long as a 2 GB swap file exists and you accept that about 1 GB of idle pages will live in swap. Running apps are not what breaks it; builds are. Our first build pushed the machine to 1.4 GB of combined use, and the swap file is what kept it alive. Build on your laptop and deploy an image, or keep builds small, and the $6 box is enough for a personal n8n, a status page and a couple of side projects.

$12, 2 GiB: headroom for builds and one more database

Same single vCPU as the $6 plan, double the memory, double the disk and transfer. The number that matters is our build peak: 1.4 GB of combined RAM and swap fits inside 2 GiB with no swap at all, so builds stop stalling the apps around them. Two Postgres-backed apps plus Coolify also fit with room, where the $6 box would be living in swap. If you build on the server, this is the floor. If you also need CPU (slow builds, several containers busy at once), the $18 plan with 2 vCPUs is the next step, not the $12 one.

Which one

One static site or one bot: $4, with a swap file. Coolify plus a few small apps, builds elsewhere: $6, with a 2 GB swap file (our setup). Builds on the server, or a second database: $12. Builds that take minutes, or many containers busy together: $18 (2 vCPU) before anything bigger.

We will add the $4 and $12 plans to the test rota when the budget allows; until then the lines above are measured on the $6 plan and extrapolated, as stated.

Sources

1. DigitalOcean Droplet pricing, read 11 Oct 2026.
2. Can Coolify really run on 1 GB? Docs vs measured reality, measured 2 Oct 2026.
3. n8n and Uptime Kuma on a 1 GB VPS, 5 days later, measured 7 Oct 2026.
4. How to add swap on Ubuntu 24.04, timed, measured 10 Oct 2026.