Right now, GKE charges $18/month for a load balancer on top of node costs, which is costly for small scale/personal projects. Will DigitalOcean have anything similar?
Jamie from DigitalOcean here. Currently we'll deploy our DigitalOcean Load Balancer on your behalf, which is $20 a month, but we are also investigating other options. If you have any thoughts on how this should work, or what specifically you'd be looking for, I'd love to hear them.
Speaking personally, I'd rather opt out of the Load Balancer altogether and instead have a floating IP automatically set up across the workers. Ingresses are easy enough to set up so that would complete the picture.
I think having the Load Balancer option is important for simplicity, but I feel a lot of DO customers (such as myself) opt to use DO for optimizing cost as well. It's a balance.