Kubernetes Pricing: The True Cost of K8s & 5 Ways to Reduce It

Quick Answer: Kubernetes itself is open-source and free. What you actually pay for is the infrastructure underneath: compute nodes, persistent storage, networking, and (on most managed services) a control plane fee of roughly $0.10 per cluster per hour. A small dev/test cluster typically costs a few hundred dollars per month, while production clusters run into thousands depending on node count, instance types, and traffic.