Managed Kubernetes
Each provider is profiled from its own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure. The price below is the control plane alone — what you pay before a single node runs — because that is the part that differs. Nodes are priced like any other compute and are compared under VPS hosting. For platforms that run a container without a cluster, see PaaS.
Managed Kubernetes
| Provider | Entry paid plan | Control plane | Pricing model |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon EKS | $0.10 per cluster per hour on standard Kubernetes version support — roughly $73 a year before any node runs. Extended version support, for clusters kept on an older Kubernetes release, is $0.60 per cluster per hour. | Per cluster per hour for the control plane, with the rate rising sixfold if you stay on an unsupported Kubernetes version. Nodes, EKS Auto Mode, add-on capabilities and hybrid nodes are each metered separately on top. | Per cluster per hour for the control plane, with the rate rising sixfold if you stay on an unsupported Kubernetes version. Nodes, EKS Auto Mode, add-on capabilities and hybrid nodes are each metered separately on top. |
| Azure Kubernetes Service | Not readable. The page names three tiers — Free with no SLA, Standard with one, Premium for long-term version support — and prints no figure against any of them in text, the same way Azure's SLA pages and Amazon's OpenSearch OCU rate do not. | Tiered by what the control plane promises rather than by capacity: Free has no SLA, Standard has one and raises the node limit to 5,000, Premium buys long-term support for older Kubernetes versions. Nodes are billed as ordinary Azure compute underneath. | Tiered by what the control plane promises rather than by capacity: Free has no SLA, Standard has one and raises the node limit to 5,000, Premium buys long-term support for older Kubernetes versions. Nodes are billed as ordinary Azure compute underneath. |
| DigitalOcean Kubernetes | Nothing for the control plane. Nodes start at $12/month each on the Basic tier, so the smallest real cluster is the node bill and nothing else. | Nodes only, with the control plane free and high availability for it sold as a $40/month upgrade. Inbound transfer is free and outbound starts at 2,000 GiB a month. | Nodes only, with the control plane free and high availability for it sold as a $40/month upgrade. Inbound transfer is free and outbound starts at 2,000 GiB a month. |
| Google Kubernetes Engine | $0.10 per cluster per hour, flat across both Autopilot and Standard modes and charged in one-second increments. | A flat per-cluster fee regardless of mode, plus compute — which is where Autopilot and Standard actually differ, Autopilot billing the Pods you request and Standard the nodes you run. | A flat per-cluster fee regardless of mode, plus compute — which is where Autopilot and Standard actually differ, Autopilot billing the Pods you request and Standard the nodes you run. |
Which to consider
A cluster that has to sit inside AWS — IAM on the cluster, VPC networking, EC2 or Fargate nodes — with a 99.95% control-plane SLA measured in five-minute intervals rather than described in prose.
Starting without paying for a control plane at all: the Free tier costs nothing and you pay only for nodes, which is the cheapest way into managed Kubernetes on a hyperscaler.
The node bill and nothing else. The control plane is free at any size, inbound transfer is free, and the smallest real cluster is one $12 node — no per-cluster fee to amortise across workloads.
One cluster, free. The $74.40 monthly credit is exactly the cluster fee for one Autopilot or zonal Standard cluster refunded, and Autopilot bills the Pods you ask for rather than the nodes you guessed at.