DigitalOcean Startups

www.digitalocean.com/startupsCloud VMcompute/digitalocean-startupsJSON compare report an error provider JSON

Free allowance: 12 months of DigitalOcean credits for accepted startups.
Verdict: caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
Cost: no price stated
Identity: emailno card, no phone
Binding limit: write-gatedA program manager decides the award and the amount stays unnamed until the onboarding email, so an applicant cannot plan against a number; the one-year expiry and the USD 10,000 monthly ceiling bind after that.
Evidence: documented4 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
Freshness: stale on 2026-11-22checked 2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-22

Free tier	12 months of DigitalOcean credits for accepted startups. Eligibility: must have raised USD 10m or less, must have a company website and an email address on that domain, and must create a registered DigitalOcean team account with a business email. Applicants with no VC, incubator or accelerator apply by selecting Other for the partner field. Participants are generally entitled to a USD 10,000 monthly limit, with charges applying above it. unit none; metered on wall-clock; one-shot-credit
Price	none stated
Limits	write-gated (binding) A program manager decides the award and the amount stays unnamed until the onboarding email, so an applicant cannot plan against a number; the one-year expiry and the USD 10,000 monthly ceiling bind after that. source
Identity	email The published criteria ask for a company website, a domain email and a registered team account, and provide an explicit route for applicants with no partner organization. No incorporation certificate is named on the program page. The credit amount is set by the partner, not by the applicant.
Egress	not stated
Interface	unknown inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed
Tooling	not stated
Composes with	The core credits exclude every GPU product, so the value is CPU droplets, Spaces and managed databases: at a USD 10,000 monthly limit a small always-on stack runs for a year. GPU access is a separate application and is not covered, which is where the chain breaks for ML work.
Reliability	no reliability event recorded
Notes	The credit amount is genuinely not published: the page says DigitalOcean awards credits through partners and directs the applicant to a program manager. Recording a dollar ceiling here would be invention, so the ceiling is null and the monthly limit of USD 10,000 is what the page states. One directory reported a USD 100K figure from a 2024 press release, which the current page supersedes.

Evidence 4

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-22	www.digitalocean.com/startups	eligibility is USD 10m or less raised, a company website with an email on that domain, and a registered team account on a business email, quoted
2026-10-22	www.digitalocean.com/startups	'Please fill out the application here and select Other when prompted for an affiliated partner organization', the no-VC route, quoted
2026-10-22	www.digitalocean.com/startups	'Participants generally are entitled to a USD 10,000 monthly limit (and charges apply for any use in a month exceeding this amount)', quoted
2026-10-22	www.digitalocean.com/startups	GPU Droplets, H100 GPU Kubernetes, Bare Metal GPUs, Dedicated Inference and Serverless Inference are excluded from core credits as of 2026-05-13, quoted

More fields 1

{
 "facets": {
  "class": "startup-credit",
  "free_tier_kind": "one-shot-credit",
  "shape": null
 }
}

Unknown values 7

$.egress.metered egress metering was not published
$.egress.terms a source was read and is silent on this field
$.interface the access interface was not established
$.per_object_cap.stated the field does not apply to this kind of offer
$.reliability_note nothing of this kind was observed
$.retention.stated the field does not apply to this kind of offer
$.tooling a source was read and is silent on this field