DigitalOcean Spaces pricing 2026: the $5 plan, overages, CDN and Cold Storage

DigitalOcean Spaces costs $5 a month. That flat subscription includes 250 GiB of storage and 1 TiB of outbound transfer, shared across up to 100 buckets, plus a built-in CDN. Past that you pay $0.02 per extra GiB stored and $0.01 per extra GiB downloaded, and uploads are always free. There is no permanent free tier and no per-request fee. All numbers on this page come from DigitalOcean’s official pricing page and product docs as of October 2026.

DigitalOcean Spaces pricing at a glance

Three rules decide how that table turns into a bill:

• One subscription covers every bucket in the account, up to 100, in any region. The 250 GiB and the 1 TiB are pooled across all of them.
• Billing starts when you create your first bucket and stops when you destroy all of them. If you cancel by deleting every bucket, the bill is prorated by the hour.
• Two small print items from the limits page: the minimum billable object size is 4 KiB, and incomplete multipart uploads are deleted automatically after 30 days.

Does DigitalOcean Spaces have a free tier?

No. Neither the pricing page nor the docs describe a free allowance for Spaces, so the $5 subscription applies from the first bucket, even if it holds a single file. That is the main difference with Cloudflare R2, which gives every account 10 GB-month of storage free every month, and with Backblaze B2, where the first 10 GB are always free. DigitalOcean does run sign-up credit offers for new accounts, but those are promotional credit, not a Spaces free tier.

Worked examples: what you would actually pay

Example 1, a small site or side project: 20 GiB stored and 100 GiB downloaded a month.

Example 2, an app storing user uploads: 500 GiB stored and 2 TiB downloaded a month.

Example 3, a large media library with moderate traffic: 1 TiB stored and 500 GiB downloaded a month.

The bill has only a handful of lines, which is the main reason people pick Spaces: you can predict it without counting API requests.

DigitalOcean CDN pricing: included, but the transfer is shared

Every Spaces bucket can turn on the built-in CDN at no extra cost, so files are served from edge caches close to the people downloading them. What is easy to miss is that the CDN does not come with its own transfer allowance. DigitalOcean’s docs say CDN and origin bandwidth both draw from the same base allowance, and the origin-to-edge transfer (the CDN fetching files from your bucket) counts against it too. Caching makes delivery faster; it does not give you a second pool of free transfer.

Other CDN details from the docs:

• Requests made with presigned URLs are not cached by the Spaces CDN. They still work through the CDN hostname, but only to keep a consistent hostname or custom domain, not for speed.
• A custom CDN subdomain needs an SSL certificate. With DNS hosted on DigitalOcean you can use a free Let’s Encrypt certificate; with DNS elsewhere you upload your own.
• Cold Storage buckets do not support the CDN.

Transfer that does not count

Not all traffic draws from the 1 TiB pool:

• Inbound transfer (uploads) is always free.
• Traffic from Spaces to Droplets is free between listed region pairs: NYC3 to NYC1, NYC2 and NYC3; SFO2 or SFO3 to SFO1, SFO2 and SFO3; AMS3 to AMS2 and AMS3; SGP1 to SGP1; and FRA1, SYD1, BLR1, ATL1, LON1 and TOR1 within the same datacenter.
• Droplets that use the VPC-local DNS resolver reach Spaces over the internal network without using the Spaces allowance, in every region. Cross-datacenter private access only works inside the AMS, NYC and SFO groups.
• Traffic from a Droplet to Spaces does not use the Spaces allowance, but it does count against the Droplet’s own outbound allowance.

If your app and your storage both live on DigitalOcean, keeping them in a matching region is the easiest saving available.

DigitalOcean Spaces Cold Storage pricing

Cold Storage is a separate storage class for data you keep for a long time and rarely read, such as backups and archives.

An overwrite counts as a delete followed by a new object, so it can trigger the early-deletion charge. Because every object is billed as at least 128 KiB, Cold Storage suits a smaller number of larger archives, not millions of tiny files. For 1 TiB of backups you rarely touch, storage comes to about $7.17 a month, compared with $15.48 of overage for the same TiB on Standard storage.

Spaces limits worth knowing before you choose

DigitalOcean recommends the CDN once a bucket needs more than 400 read requests per second, and asks clients to retry with exponential backoff when they get a 503 Slow Down.

Spaces vs Volumes: object storage vs block storage pricing

Searches for “DigitalOcean storage pricing” often mix two products. Spaces is object storage reached over the S3 API and priced as above. Volumes is block storage you attach to a Droplet as a disk: it costs $0.10 per GiB a month for the size you provision, from 1 GiB to 16 TiB, whether the disk is full or empty. For files that apps and people download, Spaces is several times cheaper per GiB; Volumes is for databases and anything that needs a filesystem.

DigitalOcean Spaces vs AWS S3 vs Cloudflare R2

Using example 2 above (500 GiB stored, 2 TiB downloaded), the rough monthly bill before request fees is about $20 on Spaces, about $8 on R2 (storage only, since egress is free) and about $200 on S3, almost all of it egress. Spaces wins over S3 for anything that is downloaded a lot; R2 wins when egress is high and request counts stay moderate. For larger archives priced per TB, see Wasabi pricing and the full provider comparison.

When Spaces makes sense

Spaces is a good fit when:

• You want a bill you can predict without counting API requests.
• Your storage and transfer sit around or a bit above 250 GiB and 1 TiB a month.
• You want a CDN without setting up a separate service.
• Your apps already run on DigitalOcean, so you can use free region pairs and private networking.

It is a weaker fit when you only need a few gigabytes (the $5 minimum applies while free allowances elsewhere cover small buckets), when you serve many terabytes to the public (each TiB beyond the pool costs about $10.24, while R2 charges nothing for egress) or when you keep tens of terabytes that are rarely read.

Managing Spaces files with Nubbo

The DigitalOcean control panel is fine for creating buckets and keys but not built for daily file work. Nubbo connects to Spaces with an access key, its secret and the bucket’s region, and adds a file browser, share links with password, expiry and download limits, galleries and file requests. Uploads and single-file downloads go straight between the browser and your bucket through presigned URLs on the regular Spaces endpoint, so downloads count against your 1 TiB like any other. Multi-file ZIP downloads are assembled in your browser, which downloads each file straight from your bucket, and thumbnails are written to your own bucket under .nubbo-thumbs/, so both show up on your Spaces usage.