Flat pricing and unmetered egress, without the usage-based tax
DigitalOcean App Platform is a capable PaaS, but its bill tends to move with your traffic and metered bandwidth. Ruust charges one flat price per Egg per month in GBP, keeps every Egg warm 24/7, and never meters your egress. You know the number before you deploy, and it stays the same next month.
Flat price per Egg, in GBP · unmetered egress · no cold starts
Here is how Ruust and DigitalOcean App Platform line up on the things that decide your monthly bill: pricing model, egress, cold starts, databases and where each one is deployed. Both let you ship a git repo to managed containers. The difference is what happens when traffic arrives.
| Ruust | DigitalOcean App Platform | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat per Egg, per month, in GBP. Presets from £3, or a custom slider. | Tiered instance pricing per component, priced in USD, usually billed per resource. |
| Egress | Unmetered on every tier. No egress bill, ever. Fair-use rate caps only. | Bandwidth allowance per app, then metered overage beyond it at time of writing. |
| Cold starts | Always-on. Every Egg kept warm 24/7. No scale-to-zero, no spin-up lag. | Usage-based inputs can encourage scaling to zero, which adds spin-up lag. |
| Bill predictability | Same number each month, same price in every region. No traffic surprises. | Usage-based inputs (bandwidth, build minutes) can shift the total month to month. |
| Databases | Managed Postgres and Redis Eggs with a persistent volume, private to your Coop. | Managed databases available, generally billed as a separate DigitalOcean product. |
| Private networking | Eggs in a Coop reach each other by hostname, deny-by-default with explicit peering. | Private networking within a project is supported across DigitalOcean services. |
| Regions | eu-west (London) and us-east (Virginia) live, Frankfurt and Singapore coming. | Multiple global datacentre regions, a mature and broad footprint. |
| Own hardware | BYOH: run the open-source agent on your Linux boxes. £2/Egg, capped £20/host. | Fully managed on DigitalOcean infrastructure, no bring-your-own-host option. |
DigitalOcean App Platform details are as we understand them and can change. Always check DigitalOcean App Platform's current pricing and features for the latest.
What you get by switching.
One flat price in GBP, not a moving USD bill
Every Egg is a fixed monthly price: Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12, Large £24, or a custom size on the slider at £12 per vCPU plus £6 per GB. The same price applies in every region, with no seat or plan fee to start. You size the app once and the bill stops being a variable.
Unmetered egress on every tier
DigitalOcean App Platform gives each app a bandwidth allowance and tends to meter traffic beyond it. Ruust does not meter egress at all, on any tier. A busy launch day or a heavy download endpoint costs exactly the same as a quiet Tuesday. Fair-use rate caps exist to stop abuse, but there is no volume cap and no egress line on your invoice.
Always-on, so no cold starts
Usage-based platforms nudge you towards scaling to zero to save money, then charge you a slow first request when traffic returns. Every Ruust Egg is kept warm 24/7. There is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag, which suits the many small, always-on apps that a flat price is built for.
Live in about two minutes
Connect a repo and Ruust autobuilds it with Nixpacks, or uses your own Dockerfile. Pick a region and a size and you are live on HTTPS in roughly two minutes, with TLS issued in about ninety seconds and renewed automatically. Zero-downtime rolling deploys, health checks, replicas and custom domains are all included.
Where DigitalOcean App Platform is the better fit.
A broad, mature cloud around it
DigitalOcean App Platform sits on top of a full cloud: Droplets, managed databases, Spaces object storage, load balancers and more, all under one account and one bill. If you want a PaaS that can grow into raw VMs and a wide product catalogue as your needs change, that breadth is a genuine strength Ruust does not try to match.
A wide global region footprint
DigitalOcean has a mature, well-established set of datacentre regions across several continents. If you need to place workloads close to users in a location Ruust has not launched yet, their footprint is broader today and that is a fair reason to choose them.
Fine-grained per-component scaling
App Platform lets you size and scale individual components of a larger app independently, with usage-based pricing that can be economical for spiky or short-lived workloads. If your traffic is genuinely bursty and often idle, paying only for what you use can work out well, and their tooling and docs for that model are strong.
Ruust vs DigitalOcean App Platform, the common questions.
Is Ruust cheaper than DigitalOcean App Platform?
It depends on your traffic, and we will not invent their prices. The honest answer: Ruust is designed to be predictable rather than always the cheapest. You pay a flat GBP price per Egg with unmetered egress, so a busy month costs the same as a quiet one. If your app is always-on and moves real traffic, that predictability usually wins. If your workload is spiky and often idle, a usage-based model can sometimes come out lower.
What does unmetered egress actually mean?
There is no metering and no volume cap on outbound bandwidth, on any tier, and no egress line on your invoice. We keep per-Egg fair-use rate caps and abuse controls so one Egg cannot degrade the platform, but you will never get a surprise bandwidth bill for serving your users.
Can I move my app across from App Platform?
Usually yes, with little change. If you deploy from a git repo with a Dockerfile, or a stack Nixpacks recognises, Ruust builds it the same way. You connect the repo, pick a region and size, add your environment variables, and point your custom domain over. Managed Postgres and Redis are available as database Eggs, or you can keep an external database and connect it by connection string.
Do I have to use Ruust's hosts?
No. With Bring Your Own Host you run our open-source, Apache-2.0 agent on your own Linux machines and keep the Ruust dashboard, CLI and control plane. It is pull based, so Ruust never dials into your host. You pay for the panel not the metal (£2 per Egg, capped at £20 per host), and egress is unmetered because it is your own pipe.