DigitalOcean Spaces pricing explained (2026)

DigitalOcean Spaces is one of the most straightforward S3-compatible storage services you can use today. It starts at $5 per month, includes a built-in CDN and does not charge per API request. But simple pricing does not mean there are no details worth understanding. Overage costs, shared transfer allowances and the lack of a free tier all affect your real-world bill.

This guide breaks down exactly what you pay for, how overages work and when Spaces is the right choice versus its competitors.

What you get for $5/month

The base plan includes:

• 250 GiB of storage. This is total stored data across all your Spaces (buckets) in any region.
• 1 TiB of outbound transfer. Data sent from your Space to the internet, including CDN delivery.
• Built-in CDN. Enabled per Space at no extra cost. Files are served from DigitalOcean’s edge caches for faster delivery.
• Unlimited API requests. PUT, GET, DELETE, LIST — none of them cost extra.
• Multiple regions. Available in data centers across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Australia.

There is no free tier. Unlike Cloudflare R2’s permanent 10 GB or AWS S3’s 12-month trial, Spaces charges from day one. For many users the $5 flat rate is low enough that this does not matter, but it is worth noting if you are comparing options for a hobby project with minimal storage needs.

Overage costs explained

Once you exceed the included allowances, pricing is pay-as-you-go:

The math is predictable. Here are two real-world examples:

Example 1: A small SaaS storing user uploads. You store 500 GiB and transfer 2 TiB outbound in a month.

• Base plan: $5.00
• Extra storage: (500 − 250) × $0.02 = $5.00
• Extra transfer: (2,048 − 1,024) × $0.01 = $10.24
• Total: $20.24/month

Example 2: A photography studio hosting client galleries. You store 1 TiB (1,024 GiB) and transfer 500 GiB outbound.

• Base plan: $5.00
• Extra storage: (1,024 − 250) × $0.02 = $15.48
• Extra transfer: 500 GiB is within the 1 TiB allowance = $0.00
• Total: $20.48/month

These numbers are easy to forecast, which is one of Spaces’ biggest selling points. You will not wake up to a bill full of line items you did not expect.

CDN: included, but transfer is shared

This is a detail that many people miss. DigitalOcean Spaces includes a CDN at no extra cost, which is genuinely valuable. However, CDN transfer counts toward your 1 TiB outbound allowance. It is not a separate pool.

When you enable the CDN on a Space, you get a dedicated CDN endpoint (e.g., your-space.region.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com). Files served through this endpoint are cached at DigitalOcean’s edge locations, reducing latency for your users. But every byte delivered through the CDN is deducted from the same 1 TiB monthly transfer budget.

This means:

• If most of your traffic is CDN-delivered, you will consume your transfer allowance faster than you might expect.
• For read-heavy workloads with popular files, the CDN cache will reduce origin fetches but the total bytes served to users still count.
• If egress is your primary cost concern, compare carefully with Cloudflare R2, which charges zero for egress regardless of volume.

The CDN is still a good deal — bundled CDN without extra configuration or billing is rare — but plan your transfer budget accordingly.

Cold storage option

DigitalOcean added a cold storage tier for Spaces, designed for infrequently accessed data like backups, archives and compliance records.

Cold storage is roughly 65% cheaper than standard storage. The tradeoff is the $0.01/GiB retrieval fee and a 30-day minimum — if you delete or move an object before 30 days, you are still billed for the full period.

This makes cold storage a good fit for data you rarely access: database backups, historical logs or completed project archives. It is not ideal for files that might need frequent retrieval, since the retrieval costs would negate the storage savings.

When DigitalOcean Spaces makes sense

Spaces is a strong choice when:

• You want predictable monthly costs without tracking individual API requests.
• You need a built-in CDN and do not want to set up a separate service like CloudFront.
• You are already using DigitalOcean Droplets, Kubernetes or App Platform and want your storage in the same ecosystem.
• Your storage and transfer needs stay roughly within the included allowances, or scale modestly beyond them.
• You are a small team, startup or freelancer who values simplicity over granular optimization.

Spaces is less ideal when:

• You serve very large amounts of data to end users. The shared CDN/transfer allowance and $0.01/GiB overage add up at scale. For egress-heavy workloads, R2’s zero egress is hard to beat.
• You need advanced storage features like object lock, cross-region replication, lifecycle transitions between multiple storage classes or event notifications. AWS S3 remains the leader for complex storage requirements.
• You want a free tier for experimentation. Spaces starts billing immediately.
• You are storing many terabytes of archival data. Wasabi at $6.99/TB with no egress fees is significantly cheaper at scale.

How Spaces compares to the alternatives

Here is a side-by-side pricing comparison with the three other major S3-compatible providers:

Cloudflare R2 ($0.015/GB, zero egress) is the strongest alternative if your workload is read-heavy. You pay nothing for outbound transfer regardless of volume, which makes it ideal for serving files, images and video to end users. The tradeoff is per-request API fees and fewer management features than S3. See our full comparison of all four providers for a deeper analysis.

AWS S3 (~$0.023/GB + expensive egress starting at $0.09/GB) is the most feature-rich option but also the most expensive and complex. It makes sense when you need deep AWS integration, advanced lifecycle policies or Glacier archival tiers.

Wasabi ($6.99/TB, no egress, no API fees) is the cheapest option for raw storage at scale. The catch is a 90-day minimum storage duration and a 1 TB minimum billing floor. If you are storing large, relatively stable datasets, Wasabi is hard to beat on price.

For a step-by-step guide on connecting DigitalOcean Spaces, see How to set up DigitalOcean Spaces with Nubbo.

Manage your Spaces from a better interface

DigitalOcean’s control panel works, but it was not built for day-to-day file management. If you need to browse files, share them securely with passwords and expiration dates, create photo galleries for client delivery or accept uploads through file requests, you will hit its limits quickly.

Nubbo connects directly to DigitalOcean Spaces and gives you a visual interface for everything the native console makes cumbersome. Your files never pass through Nubbo’s servers — every transfer happens directly between your browser and DigitalOcean using presigned URLs. You can also connect AWS S3, Cloudflare R2 and Wasabi in the same account if you use multiple providers.

Create your free account and connect your first Space in under two minutes.