Hi there, this is Shiv - I am the VP of Product at DigitalOcean. Thanks for asking about pricing. We are still working out the pricing details. I can tell you it won't be just the cost of the Droplet because this is a managed service with lots of additional features that you would not get with the current Droplet product.

If you can offer some sort of “hobby” plan with a limited I/O and DB size that would be great for hobby projects like what I build. I’ve used RDS before and it is great, but the cost is a bit eye watering when we are talking about less than one user every 10 minutes.

I’ve found Jaws DB works well for my needs (and pricing), but given they are layered on AWS it does feel like I’m still a bit limited - ie it would be good to still access the DB server so I can spin up multiple DBs (pre-prod, production etc), despite my usage being minimal.

If DO can hit a sub $10pm price point (even with severely restricted performance) that would be awesome!

This is something that has put me off services like this for personal / open source projects. I'm time and cost limited and usage will be minimal so both the expense of a managed service and the time cost of setting up my own are both unattractive.

Would DO be open to a limited 'hobby tier' for this set at the price of the droplet?

I'll second what others have said. Please consider a hobby plan. I have many proof-of-concept applications that don't require many resources at all but have the potential to suddenly get a lot bigger. Having a single stop shop where both types of projects are reasonably priced would be a godsend.

Hi Shiv, I was wondering if there is any chance I could get an early access to DO Kubernetes? tigran at cronhub io. Thank you :)

I'm guessing it will just be the cost of the droplet that it's installed on.

Sadly (as DO explained, perhaps after you posted), no.