Head-to-head, indicative as of Oct 2026. Prices change — always confirm on the vendor page.
Quick read: pick DigitalOcean if your workload is simple predictable pricing for full servers and its pricing model fits your traffic shape; pick AWS App Runner if you need containers on aws without touching ecs/eks. For anything latency-sensitive at the edge, cold start row is the tiebreaker.
| DigitalOcean | AWS App Runner | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Droplets/App Platform | Container PaaS |
| Free tier | App Platform starter; $200 credit promos | None |
| Paid pricing (indicative) | Droplets from ~$4/mo; App Platform usage-based | vCPU + memory per second, scale to zero |
| Egress | Generous pooled transfer (1-10TB) | Metered |
| Cold start | N/A (always-on droplets) | Seconds from zero |
| Regions | 13 datacenters | AWS regions |
| Best for | Simple predictable pricing for full servers | Containers on AWS without touching ECS/EKS |
Try DigitalOcean Try AWS App Runner
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