Moderate to move
RDS on DigitalOcean: what it becomes and what it costs.
On DigitalOcean, RDS becomes PostgreSQL / MySQL on DigitalOcean Droplets (Patroni or replicas, pgBackRest), or a DigitalOcean managed database. Same engines. On Hetzner you run it yourself; where the destination sells the managed engine (DigitalOcean, OVHcloud and Scaleway for most of them) it costs roughly twice the bare server, still well under today's price.
Effort grade
Moderate
Same software, self-hosted: you patch, back up and fix it
Cost after the move, before engineer time
40% of today
Modelled from instance hours; the remainder (IOPS, backup storage beyond the priced 1.5×) at 40%. db.m6g.large is $0.152/h = $111/mo vs CX33 (4 vCPU, 8 GB) €8.49.
Engineer time
6 h a month
To run the replacement: patching, backups, on-call. Plus about 5 engineer days for the move itself.
Other ways to replace it
The report lets you pick any of these per service; the figure and the grade follow.
Managed PostgreSQL / MySQL at DigitalOcean, or a DigitalOcean managed database
Where DigitalOcean sells the managed engine, backups, failover and patching stay someone else's job. Roughly twice the bare server, still well under today's price.
55% of today · Easy
Hosted Postgres elsewhere (Neon, Supabase, Crunchy Bridge)
A managed Postgres vendor next to DigitalOcean: no operations, a modest saving, and cross-provider latency to watch.
80% of today · Easy
In three modelled AWS accounts
What RDS costs in the modelled accounts and what the estimator makes of it on DigitalOcean, with the default assumptions. Not customer data.
| Account | AWS /mo | DO /mo | Change | Priced by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Early-stage SaaS$2,981/mo in total | $461 | $214 | −$247 | usage model |
| Scale-up on Kubernetes$24,950/mo in total | $4,600 | $1,576 | −$3,024 | usage model |
| Data-heavy platform$79,640/mo in total | $7,800 | $2,808 | −$4,992 | usage model |
Your own RDS line, from your export
Drop one month of your AWS cost export and the report prices every service, RDS included, on DigitalOcean list prices of 18 Oct 2026, net of the engineer time to run it. In your browser; nothing is uploaded.