DigitalOcean Introduces Agent Droplets: Everything an AI Agent Needs, One Simple Monthly Price

Both subscription sizes include unlimited agents and no seat charges, with resource usage covered by the plan’s allowance.

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Start with DigitalOcean and scale as your business grows: one subscription for compute, memory, storage, inference, and tools

BROOMFIELD, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: DOCN), the AI-Native Cloud, today announced Agent Droplets giving companies a simple way to start their agentic journey on DigitalOcean and scale with predictable spending controls. DigitalOcean Managed Agents, launched in public preview on September 22, gave builders a managed runtime, governed access to 16,000+ tools, Serverless Inference, and persistent agent memory and storage on one cloud. Agent Droplets bundle those capabilities into a single monthly subscription simplifying adoption of emerging agent technologies without the guesswork of assembling a stack. Agent Droplets come in two sizes, Pro at $50 a month and Team at $200 a month, with discounts of 15% and 20%, respectively, across all included resources.

“Fourteen years ago a Droplet made the cloud something one developer could understand and afford, and a generation of companies got built on it. The Droplet was never about a server or a VM. It was about the moment you have an idea at 11 p.m. and want it running before you go to sleep. Agents should feel like that. An Agent Droplet is one subscription for everything an agent needs. We take the guesswork out of adopting new agent technologies and managing spend, so companies can start their journey with DigitalOcean and scale it with us. You pick a size and start.”

— Vinay Kumar, Chief Product and Technology Officer, DigitalOcean

AI coding subscriptions often cap usage and charge per seat. DIY agent stacks require multiple vendors, multiple invoices, dozens of pricing units, and a pile of glue code to hold them together. Both approaches are complex, and their costs are hard to predict. Agent Droplets bring essential services together in one plan, simplifying adoption and making spend easier to predict. An AI builder on Pro or a startup team on Team pays one monthly subscription and runs as many agents as the work needs, with resource usage covered by the plan’s allowance. Customers choose whether spending stops at the plan price or continues at list prices once the allowance is used. This gives teams a defined starting budget and an explicit choice about additional spend as workloads grow.

As companies move from a first agent to production workloads, DigitalOcean provides elastic scale across the agentic primitives their applications depend on: isolated execution, Serverless Inference, persistent memory, session storage, and governed tool access. Agent Droplets simplify how teams adopt and pay for these services, while the underlying platform lets resource consumption grow with workload demand, within their chosen spending controls. Companies can start small and scale on the same cloud.

What an Agent Droplet bundles

Developers choose an Agent Droplet size to access a bundle of essential agent services, reducing the work of selecting, connecting, and managing each technology separately. The relevant discount applies automatically to the included Managed Agents resources their agents use:

• Harness Runtime: dedicated microVM sandboxes that start in about a second, resume from a pause in about 300 milliseconds (in DigitalOcean testing), and pause automatically when idle, with memory and session storage included in the discount. Use them to scale agent execution as workloads grow or run arbitrary code generated by an agent.
• Inference Engine: DigitalOcean-hosted open models including Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3. Frontier models such as Claude and GPT remain available on a pay-as-you-go basis at list price.
• Action Gateway: governed access to more than 16,000 tools, including code interpreter, browser automation, web search, and web fetch, with credentials brokered outside the agent.
• Also included: unlimited agents, no seat charges, observability, and enterprise security (single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, role-based access, audit logs, cloud firewalls, and DDoS protection) on every size.

DigitalOcean plans to add more resources to Agent Droplets over time, helping customers adopt additional agentic capabilities as their needs evolve.

Try it free, then scale into a plan

New customers can start with a free trial: $5 in credit, no card required, enough to take an idea from zero to running this afternoon. To scale, Agent Droplet Pro and Team apply a bigger discount to every hour, token, and gigabyte included in the plan, 15% off on Pro and 20% off on Team.

	Free Trial	Pro	Team
Monthly price	$5 credit	$50	$200
Discount on agent usage	-	15%	20%
Designed for	Testing a PR review or a coding session	Teams starting their Agentic Journey	Teams scaling their Agentic Journey
Discounted resources	- Inference on DigitalOcean-hosted models - Compute (dedicated microVMs) - Memory - Session storage - Governed access to 16,000+ tools
Agents and seats	Unlimited, no seat charges
Enterprise security	Included: Single sign-on, MFA, role-based access, audit logs, cloud firewalls, DDoS protection
Models not hosted on DigitalOcean (e.g., Claude and GPT) are billed at list price.

Inference and Agents Balance

DigitalOcean also announced Inference and Agents Balance to make it easier for customers to prepay for their agents. Inference and Agents Balance is a prepaid balance, funded in amounts from $5 to $500, that only Serverless Inference, Action Gateway, and Managed Agents can use, while the rest of the cloud keeps billing as usual. Fund your Inference and Agents Balance directly, and your agents draw on it automatically once your Agent Droplet allowance is used up.

Availability

Agent Droplets and Inference and Agents Balance are available today in all regions where DigitalOcean Managed Agents is offered. Developers can create an Agent Droplet or add to their Inference and Agents Balance in the DigitalOcean Cloud Console, and agents already running on Managed Agents move onto an Agent Droplet without changes. New DigitalOcean users receive a $5 promotional credit to launch their first agent session, subject to eligibility and DigitalOcean’s promotional credit terms (https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/terms-of-service-agreement; https://www.digitalocean.com/legal/promotional-credit-discount-terms). To learn more, read the launch blog at digitalocean.com/blog or visit digitalocean.com/products/managed-agents.

About DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean (NYSE: DOCN) is the AI-Native Cloud, purpose-built for inference and agentic workloads. Its five-layer integrated platform, spanning GPU and CPU infrastructure, core cloud, inference, data, and managed agent orchestration, is open throughout with no vendor lock-in, giving builders everything they need to start fast, scale production AI workloads, and improve unit economics. More than 680,000 customers and millions of developers globally trust DigitalOcean to build, ship, and scale their applications. Learn more at digitalocean.com.

Forward-looking statements. This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding product capabilities, pricing, and availability, including plans to add resources to Agent Droplets. Agent Droplets and Managed Agents are offered as a public preview; DigitalOcean expects but does not guarantee that public preview services perform for production-level workloads. Actual results may differ materially. Additional information on risks is included in DigitalOcean’s filings with the SEC, including its most recent Annual Report on Form 10-K and subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261001453753/en/

Media contact

press@digitalocean.com

Source: DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc.

Key Terms

microvm technical

A microVM is a very small, lightweight virtual machine that runs a single application or service with minimal operating system overhead. Think of it as a tiny, self-contained apartment with its own lock and utilities instead of a large shared building: it provides stronger isolation than a container but starts and uses resources much more quickly than a traditional virtual machine. Investors watch microVMs because they can lower cloud costs, improve security and scalability for software providers, and influence the economics of cloud services and products.

serverless inference technical

Serverless inference is a way to run artificial intelligence models on demand without a company owning or managing the underlying servers; the cloud provider automatically supplies computing power when a request comes in and bills only for actual usage. For investors, it matters because it lets businesses add AI features quickly, scale up or down with customer demand, and convert large upfront infrastructure costs into smaller, predictable operating expenses — which can improve margins and speed product rollout.

multi-factor authentication technical

A security method that requires users to prove their identity in two or more different ways before accessing accounts or systems, such as combining a password with a one-time code sent to a phone or a fingerprint. For investors, it reduces the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive accounts, lowers chances of fraud or data breaches, and helps protect a company’s financials and reputation—similar to needing both a key and a fingerprint to open a safe.

ddos protection technical

DDoS protection is a set of tools and services that defend a website or online service against distributed denial-of-service attacks, where many compromised devices flood a target with traffic to slow it down or make it unavailable. For investors, it matters because reliable protection keeps a company’s online operations running—like security guards and extra doors preventing a crowd from blocking entry—helping preserve revenue, customer trust, uptime and avoiding costly outages or regulatory trouble.