How much does managed Kubernetes cost?
Managed Kubernetes costs a control plane fee plus everything the cluster runs on. As of November 2026, Amazon EKS, Google GKE and Azure AKS (Standard tier) each charge $0.10 per cluster per hour, about $73 a month, and $0.60 per hour for versions on extended or long-term support. The control plane is rarely the largest line: nodes, load balancers, NAT gateways, storage and data transfer usually make up most of the bill.
The parts of a managed Kubernetes bill
| Line item | What drives it | Typical share |
|---|---|---|
| Control plane fee | Number of clusters, hours, support tier | Small, fixed per cluster |
| Nodes (VMs or serverless capacity) | vCPU and memory, instance family, on-demand vs spot or committed pricing | Largest |
| Load balancers | One per exposed LoadBalancer Service or Ingress, plus traffic units | Small to medium |
| NAT gateways | Hourly charge plus per-GB processing for outbound traffic from private nodes | Small to medium, grows with traffic |
| Storage | Persistent volumes, snapshots, node boot disks | Medium for stateful workloads |
| Data transfer | Internet egress, cross-zone and cross-region traffic | Varies widely |
| Logs and metrics | Ingested and retained volume in the provider’s monitoring service | Often underestimated |
Because the shares depend on the workload, comparing providers on the control plane fee alone says little about the final bill. For the networking lines, see what cloud egress fees are.
Control plane fees as of November 2026
| Service | Standard fee | Extended or long-term support | Free option |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon EKS | $0.10 per cluster-hour | $0.60 per cluster-hour (standard fee + $0.50) | None |
| Google GKE | $0.10 per cluster-hour, all modes and topologies | $0.60 per cluster-hour (standard fee + $0.50) for versions in the extended support period | $74.40 monthly credit per billing account, enough for one zonal or Autopilot cluster |
| Azure AKS | Free tier: no cluster management fee, no financially backed SLA. Standard tier: $0.10 per cluster-hour | Premium tier with Long Term Support: $0.60 per cluster-hour | Free tier |
Extended support deserves attention because it is easy to enter by accident. On EKS, extended support is enabled by default: a cluster still on a minor version 14 months after EKS released it moves to the $0.60 rate automatically, raising the control plane cost from about $73 to about $438 a month. GKE charges its extended fee only for clusters on the Extended release channel once their version leaves standard support. How long each version stays in standard support is covered in the Kubernetes version support lifecycle.
Some services charge for more than the control plane. EKS Auto Mode adds a management charge per EC2 instance it launches, on top of the instance price. EKS Hybrid Nodes cost $0.020 per vCPU-hour for the first 576,000 vCPU-hours a month.
Pricing models
Managed Kubernetes services bill in four main ways:
- Per cluster. A flat hourly fee per control plane, as with EKS, GKE and AKS Standard. Cheap for a few large clusters, expensive for many small ones.
- Per node or per instance. A fee for each managed node, as with EKS Auto Mode’s per-instance charge. Scales with fleet size.
- Per requested Pod resources. GKE Autopilot bills general-purpose workloads for the CPU, memory and ephemeral storage their Pods request, not for nodes. Idle node capacity costs nothing, but over-sized requests cost money.
- Per vCPU under management. A fee per vCPU attached to the cluster, independent of where the vCPU runs, as with EKS Hybrid Nodes.
Burst traffic affects these models differently. Per-cluster fees stay flat. Per-Pod billing rises and falls with requests. Per-node and per-vCPU fees follow the capacity the autoscaler adds.
Worked example: a small production cluster on EKS
One EKS cluster in US East (Ohio) with three on-demand m7i.xlarge nodes (4 vCPU, 16 GiB each), one Network Load Balancer and one NAT gateway, at list prices as of November 2026 and 730 hours a month:
| Item | Rate | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| EKS control plane, standard support | $0.10 per hour | $73.00 |
3 × m7i.xlarge, Linux, on-demand | $0.2016 per hour each (EC2 pricing) | $441.50 |
| Network Load Balancer, hourly part | $0.0225 per hour (ELB pricing) | $16.43 |
| NAT gateway, hourly part | $0.045 per hour (VPC pricing) | $32.85 |
| Subtotal before usage charges | $563.78 |
Usage charges come on top: load balancer capacity units, $0.045 per GB processed by the NAT gateway, EBS volumes, public IPv4 addresses at $0.005 per hour each, internet egress beyond the 100 GB AWS includes each month, and CloudWatch logs. In this example the control plane is 13 percent of the fixed cost and the nodes are 78 percent. Committed-use discounts and spot instances act on the larger share; see how to reduce Kubernetes costs.
The same cluster on GKE or AKS Standard carries the same control plane fee, with node and network prices from each provider’s own list. The Amazon EKS vs Google GKE comparison covers the differences between the two, and the AWS Fargate pricing guide covers serverless nodes on EKS.
How to estimate your own cost
- Count clusters and multiply by the control plane fee, including the extended support rate for any cluster you will not keep inside the standard support window.
- Sum the vCPU and memory your workloads request, add headroom for system Pods and scaling, and price it as nodes.
- Add one load balancer per exposed service and a NAT gateway per zone if nodes run in private subnets.
- Estimate egress and log volume from your current environment, since these vary the most.
Cloudfleet pricing
Cloudfleet charges a flat monthly base fee per cluster that includes a set number of vCPUs, plus a per-vCPU fee above it: Basic is €12 with 8 vCPUs included, Pro is €69 with 24 vCPUs and Enterprise starts from €499 with 96 vCPUs, prorated by the minute. The vCPU fee applies to cloud and on-premises nodes alike, and compute for cloud nodes is charged at the cloud provider’s prices. See the pricing page for per-vCPU rates and plan details.