DigitalOcean vs Together AI
The developer cloud — Droplets, Kubernetes, Managed DBs, App Platform
vs. Open-source LLM infra — inference + fine-tuning + dedicated GPUs + image/video/audio
Pricing tiers
DigitalOcean
Functions (Serverless)
Free 90k GB-sec/month. $0.0000185 per GB-sec after.
$0 base (usage-based)
App Platform — Free
Static sites free forever. 3 static sites per account.
Free
Droplet — Basic 512MB
Shared CPU, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB SSD, 500 GiB transfer. Cheapest starting tier.
$4/mo
Spaces Object Storage
$5/month — 250 GB storage + 1 TB outbound. S3-compatible.
$5/mo
App Platform — Basic
$5/month per app. 512 MB RAM, 1 vCPU, 1 GB bandwidth.
$5/mo
Droplet — Basic 1GB
Shared CPU, 1 GB RAM, 25 GB SSD.
$6/mo
Kubernetes (DOKS)
Starts at $12/month (1 node). Control plane free.
$12/mo
Droplet — Basic 2GB
1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD, 2 TB transfer.
$12/mo
Load Balancer
$12/month. Supports HTTP/3 + Let's Encrypt.
$12/mo
Managed Postgres — Basic
1 GB RAM, 1 vCPU, 10 GB SSD. Single node.
$15/mo
Droplet — CPU Optimized
2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM dedicated. Best for CPU-bound workloads.
$42/mo
Enterprise
Custom. Volume discounts, dedicated support.
Custom
Together AI
Pay-as-you-go
Per-token pricing for serverless inference. No minimum.
$0 base (usage-based)
Dedicated Endpoints
Single-tenant GPU endpoints billed hourly.
$0 base (usage-based)
Batch API (50% off)
50% discount for async batch processing on most serverless models.
$0 base (usage-based)
Reserved GPU Clusters
6+ day commitments with discounted reserved rates.
$0 base (usage-based)
Enterprise
Custom. Private deployments, VPC, SLAs, dedicated support.
Custom
Free-tier quotas head-to-head
Comparing functions on DigitalOcean vs payg on Together AI.
| Metric | DigitalOcean | Together AI |
|---|---|---|
| No overlapping quota metrics for these tiers. | ||
Features
DigitalOcean · 14 features
- App Platform — Heroku-style PaaS. Deploy from Git. Auto-HTTPS, auto-scale, zero-downtime deploy…
- Backups — Weekly automated backups (20% of Droplet cost). Manual snapshots.
- Block Storage Volumes — SSD block storage attachable to Droplets. Snapshot support.
- DigitalOcean GenAI Platform — Managed AI agents, model-as-a-service (Llama, Mistral), knowledge bases.
- DNS — Free DNS hosting for your domains.
- DOKS (Kubernetes) — Managed Kubernetes. Free control plane. Node auto-repair.
- Droplets — Virtual machines with shared or dedicated CPU. 20+ one-click Marketplace images.
- Functions — Serverless functions. Node, Python, Go, PHP, Ruby. Pay-per-execution.
- Load Balancers — Layer 4/7 load balancing with HTTP/3 + Let's Encrypt.
- Managed Databases — Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, OpenSearch, Valkey. Automated backups + …
- Marketplace — 300+ one-click Droplet + Kubernetes apps.
- Monitoring — Built-in metrics + alerts for Droplets, DBs, Load Balancers.
- Spaces — S3-compatible object storage with built-in CDN.
- VPC — Private networking. Free. Automatic default VPC per region.
Together AI · 14 features
- Audio (ASR + TTS) — Whisper Large v3 + Cartesia Sonic-3.
- Batch API — 50% discount for async processing.
- Code Interpreter — LLM with integrated code execution.
- Code Sandbox — Secure Python execution environment.
- Dedicated Endpoints — Single-tenant GPU endpoints for consistent latency.
- Embeddings — BGE + nomic + mxbai embedding models.
- Fine-Tuning — LoRA + full fine-tune + DPO on Llama, Qwen, Mistral.
- Image Generation — FLUX.2, SD3, Ideogram, etc.
- OpenAI-Compat API — Drop-in OpenAI SDK replacement.
- Private Deploy — Dedicated tenant + VPC.
- Reranker — Rerank model for RAG retrieval refinement.
- Reserved Clusters — Discounted GPU clusters for committed use.
- Serverless Inference — 200+ open models. OpenAI-compatible API.
- Video Generation — Veo 3.0, Kling 2.1, Vidu 2.0.
Developer interfaces
| Kind | DigitalOcean | Together AI |
|---|---|---|
| CLI | doctl CLI | Together CLI |
| SDK | godo (Go), pydo (official py), python-digitalocean | together-js, together-python |
| REST | DigitalOcean REST API | Code Sandbox / Interpreter, Dedicated Endpoints, Together REST API (OpenAI-compat) |
| MCP | DigitalOcean MCP | — |
Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to DigitalOcean and Together AI are plain references to their official websites. Pricing is verified against vendor pages at publication time — reconfirm before buying.
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