Non technical person- help me understand billing

Question

We are creating a saas app with 2 user portals that are separate with role based access. Both apps have a dashboard, financial calculator, and articles and resources but their data and resources are separate. (manager portal and employee portal) I want to have staging, production and deployment environments for both as well as storage and a database. This is for our MVP ~100-500 users canadian market.

I’ve hired a contractor developer and want to understand what I need to purchase for him to start working.

Thank you kindly,

-Edwin Kim

Bobby · Answer

Hi there Edwin! You don’t need to “purchase” things upfront like a traditional product. On DigitalOcean, billing is calculated hourly. For example, if you spin up an app or a database and only use it for a few hours, and then destroy it, you’ll just be billed for that time. You’re not locked into a monthly commitment unless you keep it running the whole month. A good first step would be to create a DigitalOcean account , which comes with $200 in free credit for new users. You can invite your developer to the project and give them access to spin up resources and set things up for development and testing. That credit should give you plenty of runway to build your MVP and test different setups without immediate cost. This is one of the things I love DigitalOcean for, their pricing model is very simple and fair for developers. You can explore the estimated costs based on the resources you’ll need using the official DigitalOcean pricing page . It covers App Platform, databases, storage, and more. Let your developer handle the architecture and provisioning, but now you’ll know what’s going on under the hood and how the billing works. Let me know if you have any questions. - Bobby

alexdo · Answer

Heya, @edwinkim You don’t need to make large upfront purchases with DigitalOcean, everything is billed hourly, so you pay only for what you use. If you spin up a Droplet or database and delete it a few hours later, you’re only billed for those hours. There’s no commitment unless you leave resources running all month. Regards

James Wood · Answer

Absolutely! Think of billing like a utility bill (like water or electricity). You’re being charged based on how much of a service you use. In most tech platforms or cloud services (like AWS, Azure, OpenAI, etc.), billing works like this: Usage-Based: You only pay for what you use. This could mean the number of requests, amount of data processed, or time a service runs. Tiers or Plans: Some services offer different pricing levels. A free tier might give you a small amount of usage for free, and then you pay more as you go beyond that. Monthly Billing Cycle: Charges are usually calculated monthly, and you get an invoice with a breakdown of what you used and how much it cost. Here’s an analogy: If you’re using an AI service, think of it like sending text messages. Each message (or action) uses up a small portion of your plan. The more you send, the more it costs. If you barely use it, your bill stays low. If you’re not sure what specific charges mean on your bill, look for a usage report or breakdown—most platforms provide one. And if you’re still confused, support or community forums can help clarify line by line.

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Non technical person- help me understand billing

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