Introducing Agent Droplets: everything an agent needs, one price, one bill

Introducing Agent Droplets: everything an agent needs, one price, one bill | DigitalOcean

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Introducing Agent Droplets: everything an agent needs, one price, one bill

By DigitalOcean

Updated: October 1, 2026 8 min read

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Last week we launched DigitalOcean Managed Agents in public preview: a managed runtime, governed access to more than 16,000 tools, serverless inference, and persistent memory and storage, all on one cloud. Developers have already started thousands of agent sessions. Today we’re making the next part simpler: paying for it.

Building an agent that does something useful has gotten easy. Running it has not. A production agent needs a harness to drive the loop, a sandbox to execute code safely, inference to think, storage to remember between sessions, and tools to reach the web and other systems. Today, those come from different companies, each billing in its own unit on a separate invoice.

Here is one stack a customer described to us: OpenCode Go as the harness, Fly.io for sandboxes, AWS for storage, Fireworks for inference on open models, Anthropic for frontier models, and Parallel for web search. The harness was a flat monthly subscription. Sandbox time was billed per CPU-hour and GB-hour. Inference was per token, at a different rate for every model. Storage was per gigabyte-month plus requests. Search was per thousand queries. Six vendors, six invoices, dozens of pricing units, and a pile of glue code to hold it together.

Nobody on the team could say what a single agent run had cost.

The offerings that try to combine some of these pieces have a gap in the middle. Sandbox vendors do not run inference. Harness and model vendors do not run sandboxes or storage, and some limit agent workloads on their flat subscriptions. The hyperscalers do run everything, but they meter it as a dozen separate line items with enterprise-grade complexity to match. If you are one developer or a small team, none of these give you the thing you actually want: a price you can predict and a bill you can read.

A better way, from the people who brought you the Droplet

Fourteen years ago we put a virtual machine on the internet for $5 a month with everything included, and called it a Droplet. A generation of developers built on it because they could understand the bill. Agents are in the same place now, and we think the answer is the same. Unlike anyone else in this market, DigitalOcean prices the microVMs, storage, inference on our own hosted models, and governed access to 16,000+ tools as one simple plan with one discount. Competitors who run comparable infrastructure still sell these as separate metered line items or add-ons, for example, memory, gateway, and observability are billed separately on AWS AgentCore. DigitalOcean bundles all of it into a single plan.

Today we’re introducing Agent Droplets, one simple monthly price for DigitalOcean Managed Agents .

Pick an Agent Droplet , build your agents, and the discount applies automatically to everything they use: the compute and memory they run on, the DigitalOcean-hosted inference behind them, the storage they keep between sessions, and the tools they reach. Every agent resource is discounted, not just one layer. When your Agent Droplet allowance is used up, usage continues at list prices from your Inference and Agent Balance. Your agents keep working, and there is still only one bill.

We also include things other vendors charge for:

No limit on the number of environments. Run one or a hundred on any Agent Droplet.

No seat charges. An Agent Droplet covers your team’s agents, not a head count.

No charge for enterprise security. Enterprise-grade IAM is included on every Agent Droplet.

Agents run inside dedicated microVMs that start in seconds, resume from a pause in about 300 milliseconds, and pause automatically when they are not working, so an idle agent costs almost nothing. Bring the harness you already use: Claude Code, Codex CLI, OpenCode, Hermes, or agents built with CrewAI or LangGraph.

We plan to add more resources to Agent Droplets over time.

Six vendors and six bills today, versus one Agent Droplet on DigitalOcean.

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. When you’re ready for more, Agent Droplet Pro and Team apply a bigger discount to every hour, token, and gigabyte your agents use, 15% off on Pro and 20% off on Team. Moving up a tier costs more but lowers the price of everything underneath it.

Free Trial Pro Team

Monthly price $5 credit $50 $200

Discount on agent usage – 15% 20%

Inference * Models hosted on DigitalOcean, including Kimi K3 and GLM 5.3 ✓ ✓

Compute Dedicated microVMs, start in about a second, pause when idle ✓ ✓

Memory Included in the discount ✓ ✓

Session storage Included in the discount ✓ ✓

Tools Governed access to 16,000+ tools, including code interpreter, browser automation, web search, and web fetch ✓ ✓

Agents Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited

Seats Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited

Enterprise security Included: single sign-on, MFA, role-based access, audit logs, cloud firewalls, DDoS protection ✓ ✓

Example workloads and resource usage

Free Trial Pro Team

Who is this for? Developers testing a PR review or a coding session Teams starting agentic workloads Teams with agents in production and starting to scale

Examples of how much you can do A few PR reviews, one full session, quick CI runs. 6 small apps, ~12 large refactors, or ~60 fixes 10 apps, ~ 50 large refactors, or ~300 fixes

Inference * ~4.5M tokens ~53M tokens ~225M tokens

Agent hours ~20 agent hours ~235 agent hours ~1,000 agent hours

Storage ~2 GB-months ~24 GB-months ~100 GB-months

Tools ~$0.10 ~$1.20 ~$5

*Figures are estimates, not an included allowance; actual usage depends on your workload. Estimates assume a usage mix of ~70% inference, ~24% compute and memory, about 4% storage and about 2% tools; inference at $0.7766 per 1M tokens (blended average for GLM 5.3); and compute on the Medium shape (2 vCPU, 4 GB).

If your Inference and Agent Balance reaches $0, running sessions pause at the next safe stopping point and their working state is preserved in a snapshot. Completed work is preserved; add funds to resume where you left off.

What $50 of agent work looks like on paper

Take the stack from earlier and give it a...