Question

How do I cap usage?

I originally signed up with D.O. years ago because they shut down your resources after your pre-paid credit ran out. If I want “alerts”, I can just use AWS. I’m looking to shut down my services automatically at a certain billing level. My account is for instructional purposes. I’m not interested in open-ended billing where an accident can bankrupt you.


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This is becoming a big issue. Any host who offers a way to limit spend will win. Netlify and Vercel have some horror stories out there.

Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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June 16, 2024

Hey @dwmantaray,

DigitalOcean does not currently offer an automated way to cap your usage and shut down your services once you reach a specific billing level.

What I personally do is to set up billing alerts to notify me when my spending reaches a certain threshold. You can set those thresholds pretty low so that you would get notified early.

You can also write a shell script to shutdown your Droplets so that you could do that quickly in case that you get an alert. You can use the doctl CLI to do that:

https://docs.digitalocean.com/reference/doctl/reference/compute/droplet-action/shutdown/

The best thing to do to get your voice heard regarding this would be to head over to our Product Ideas board and post a new idea, including as much information as possible for what you’d like to see implemented.

https://ideas.digitalocean.com/

- Bobby.

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