Stack Cost AI

Containers And Kubernetesenterprise stack.

For each requirement below, pick the option that fits your build — recommended first, then free and cheaper alternatives — or skip what your project doesn't need. Tap the info icon next to any requirement to see why it matters.

Container Runtime (Developer Workstation)

Pricing & free-tier limitsDocker Personal Free (<250 employees & <$10M revenue), Pro $21/mo per user (5000 pulls/day, unlimited private repos), Team $35/user/mo + SSO + audit, Business $24/user/mo billed annually $252/yr min 5 seats. containerd/Podman OSS Free unlimited containers. Docker Hub anonymous 100 pulls/6h, auth Free 200/6h, Pro 5000/day. Overage: $0.05/GB after 200GB pulls.

Container Registry (Private Image Storage)

Pricing & free-tier limitsGHCR Free 500MB storage + 1GB egress/mo + 2GB packages (Pro), then $0.008/GB-mo storage + $0.12/GB egress over. Docker Hub Free 1 private repo, Pro $5/mo 5 repos unlimited pulls. ECR $0.10/GB-mo storage (0.5GB free 12mo new), $0.09/GB egress + $0.20/1k API calls, ECR Public Free 50GB-mo bandwidth. GAR $0.10/GB-mo storage + $0.09-0.12/GB egress.

Managed Kubernetes Control Plane Cluster

Pricing & free-tier limitsK3s Free OSS $0 control plane fee self-hosted. AKS Free tier $0 cluster mgmt, SLA tier $0.10/hr ~$72/mo per cluster. GKE Standard 1 free zonal cluster no SLA, Enterprise $0.10/hr ~$73/mo + $0.10/hr per cluster for SLA uptime. EKS $0.10/hr ~$73/mo per cluster + EC2/Fargate compute, new account 1 EKS free 6mo credits. GKE Autopilot $0.10/hr cluster + $0.0445/vCPU-hr + $0.004995/GB-hr. Workers not incl.

Kubernetes Worker Nodes (Virtual Machines)

Pricing & free-tier limitsOracle Free Tier Ampere A1 4 vCPU 24GB RAM + 200GB storage forever free. Hetzner CX11 $4.15/mo, CX22 $7.50/mo. AWS Spot 60-70% off ~$0.015/hr t3.micro spot vs $0.0104 on-demand $0.034/hr e2-medium. GCP Spot $0.010/vCPU-hr ~60% discount. On-demand GKE e2-standard-2 $48.55/mo, e2-standard-4 $97/mo. EBS gp3 $0.08/GB-mo + $0.005/prov IOPS-mo over 3000, egress $0.09/GB.

Serverless Containers (Container-as-a-Service)

Pricing & free-tier limitsCloud Run Free 2M req/mo + 360k vCPU-sec + 180k GiB-sec + 1GB egress/mo, then $0.40/M reqs after + $0.00002400/vCPU-sec ($0.0864/vCPU-hr) + $0.00000250/GiB-sec ($0.009/GB-hr). Fly.io Free 3x shared-cpu-1x 256MB VMs + 3GB vol + 160GB egress, then $1.94/mo per VM $0.000014/sec + $0.15/GB vol. ECS Fargate $0.04048/vCPU-hr + $0.004445/GB-hr + $0.09/GB egress, Fargate Spot 70% off ~$0.01214/vCPU-hr.

Container Orchestration for Batch / Jobs

Pricing & free-tier limitsK8s Jobs/CronJobs Free built-in OSS unlimited. Nomad OSS Free unlimited jobs self-hosted, Enterprise $0.10-$0.30/hr per client via HCP $35k/yr. AWS Batch Fargate $0.04048/vCPU-hr + $0.004445/GB-hr, Free 5k vCPU-hrs credits new accounts, no control plane fee. GCP Batch $0.01/vCPU-hr + $0.001/GB-hr + $0.003/hr scheduling.

Service Mesh / mTLS (L7 Traffic Management)

Pricing & free-tier limitsIstio/Linkerd/Cilium OSS Free unlimited sidecars/proxies self-hosted. Cilium OSS Free eBPF mesh. Enterprise: Cilium EE $49k/yr per cluster up to 100 nodes + $350/node/yr over 100 + support, includes Hubble, encryption. Tetrate Istio Subscription $50k/yr per cluster, Service Bridge $75k/yr per mesh. No per-request fee OSS.

Ingress Controller / K8s Load Balancer

Pricing & free-tier limitsingress-nginx/Cilium OSS Free. Cloudflare Tunnel Free unlimited tunnels, Zero Trust $7/user/mo free 50 users. AWS ALB $0.0225/hr ~$16.20/mo + $0.008/LCU-hr + $0.09/GB egress. GKE Ingress Free controller + $0.025/hr forwarding rule + $0.008/GB processed + $0.09/GB egress. NGINX Plus $2500/instance/yr optional.

Container Image Build Service

Pricing & free-tier limitsBuildx/BuildKit OSS Free unlimited local builds. GitHub Actions Free 2000 min/mo (3000 Pro) + 500MB artifact cache free, then Linux $0.008/min ($0.48/hr), Windows $0.016/min, macOS $0.08/min, 10GB cache over $0.25/GB-mo. Cloud Build Free 120 build-min/day, then $0.003/min (~$0.18/hr). CodeBuild Free 100 builds/mo 3mo trial, then $0.005/min small Linux $0.30/hr. Depot Free 20hr/wk, Team $50/mo 200hr/wk.

CI/CD for Container Deployment

Pricing & free-tier limitsGitHub Actions Free 2000 min Linux + 500MB cache, Pro 3000 min, Team $4/user/mo + overage Linux $0.008/min macOS $0.08/min. GitLab SaaS Free 400 credits (~800 Linux min), Premium $29/user/mo 10k credits. Buildkite Free 1 agent trial, Teams $15/user/mo + $15/host/mo, Enterprise $29/user/mo. CircleCI Free 6000 credits/wk, Performance $30/mo + $0.00008/credit. Harness Free 1 cluster.

Kubernetes Monitoring & Metrics

Pricing & free-tier limitsPrometheus+Grafana OSS Free unlimited metrics self-hosted + storage $0.023/GB S3. Grafana Cloud Free 10k Prometheus series + 50GB logs + 50GB traces + 10k synthetic checks/mo, Pro $29/mo base + $8/1000 series over + $0.50/GB logs over, Scale $4200/mo. Datadog Infra $15/host/mo + $0.10/container/mo (100 free containers/host) + $0.10/custom metric/mo (100 free), APM $31/host/mo, logs $0.10/GB ingested $1.70/GB indexed.

Log Aggregation for Containers

Pricing & free-tier limitsLoki OSS Free unlimited self-hosted + S3 $0.023/GB-mo. Grafana Cloud Free 50GB logs/mo + 30d retention then $0.50/GB ingest + $0.12/GB retention >30d. Datadog Logs $0.10/GB ingested (Live $0.10/100 events) + $1.70/GB indexed 15d retention, $1.50/GB 30d. Elastic Cloud Serverless from $95/mo 2GB RAM + $0.12/GB ingest + $0.023/GB storage/mo + $0.12/GB snapshot.

Container Vulnerability Scanning

Pricing & free-tier limitsTrivy/Grype OSS Free unlimited scans self-hosted. Docker Scout Free 3 repos + 5000 image analysis/min, Pro $21/mo includes 250 scans/mo + policies. GHCR advanced security $0.04/hour? included with GitHub Advanced $20/mo. Snyk Free 200 container tests/mo, Team $26/prd? Container secure Team $98/mo per product, Business $25/user/mo ~$300/yr. Wiz Starter $30k/yr + scanning per image included, enterprise $100k+/yr, no per-scan overage.

Kubernetes Secrets Management

Pricing & free-tier limitsSealed Secrets / ESO OSS Free unlimited. Vault OSS Free self-hosted. HCP Vault Dedicated $0.03/hr ~$21.90/mo small cluster + $0.10/secret/mo after 25 free secrets + $0.05/1k API calls. AWS Secrets Manager Free 30 days then $0.40/secret/mo + $0.05/10k API calls + $0.20/Replication. Azure Key Vault $0.03/10k operations.

Persistent Storage for Containers (CSI Driver)

Pricing & free-tier limitsOpenEBS/Longhorn OSS Free replication 3x underlying disks cost. Hetzner Volume $0.048/GB-mo (10GB $0.48, 1TB $48). AWS EBS gp3 $0.08/GB-mo + $0.012/GB snapshot/mo + IOPS over 3000 $0.005/prov IOPS-mo (16k max), sc1 cold $0.015/GB-mo. GCP Balanced PD $0.10/GB-mo, SSD $0.17/GB-mo, snapshot $0.05/GB-mo. Portworx Enterprise $0.20/GB-mo min $2k/mo, $400/node/yr license.

Container Backup & Disaster Recovery

Pricing & free-tier limitsVelero OSS Free unlimited + S3 storage $0.023/GB-mo standard, $0.0036/GB Glacier. K10 Free up to 10 nodes /5 namespaces + 30d retention. Starter $0.10/vCPU-hr ~$2500-3k/yr per 50 workers, Enterprise custom $8k+/yr. CloudCasa Free 1 cluster 30d retention, Pro $3.90/worker node/mo + $0.08/GB backup/mo, Enterprise custom. Overage $0.08/GB snapshot.

Kubernetes Autoscaling (HPA/VPA/KEDA/Karpenter)

Pricing & free-tier limitsHPA/VPA/KEDA/Karpenter OSS Free self-hosted, Karpenter savings 30-50% vs Cluster Autoscaler. GKE Autopilot $0.10/hr cluster + $0.0445/vCPU-hr autoscaled + $0.004995/GB-hr includes autoscaling no extra fee. EKS Auto Mode $0 infra extra over compute. CAST AI Free inventory tier, Optimizer $0.11/vCPU-hr after savings min $1000/mo, Enterprise $2000/mo. No per-scale event fee.

Service Discovery & DNS for Containers

Pricing & free-tier limitsCoreDNS/ExternalDNS/Consul OSS Free unlimited built-in. Cloudflare DNS Free unlimited queries + proxy, Workers $5/mo. HCP Consul Dev $0.027/hr ~$19.71/mo + $0.15/hr prod standard ~$110/mo + $0.12/GB-month? + networking. AWS Cloud Map $0.10/service/mo + $0.10/100k API queries + $0.04/1000 discovery API calls.

Local Kubernetes Development Cluster

Pricing & free-tier limitskind/minikube/k3d OSS Free unlimited local clusters, no license fee. Rancher Desktop Free OSS includes moby/containerd + k3s. Docker Desktop Pro $21/mo per user, Team $35/user/mo, Business $24/user/mo min 5 seats annual, includes 1 local K8s cluster. Lens IDE Community Free, Pro $15/user/mo $180/yr. No infra cost beyond laptop.

Policy Engine & Governance (OPA/Gatekeeper)

Pricing & free-tier limitsGatekeeper/Kyverno OSS Free unlimited policies self-hosted. Styra DAS Free up to 5 systems, Pro $200/mo 10 systems + OPA bundles, Enterprise $50k/yr unlimited + SLA, includes audit + GUI. Nirmata Enterprise $15k/yr up to 50 clusters + $150/cluster/yr after. No per-request fee.

GitOps Deployment Controller

Pricing & free-tier limitsArgo CD/FluxCD OSS Free unlimited clusters, self-hosted compute ~$20/mo small VM. Codefresh Free 1 runtime unlimited deployments, Scale $500/mo 3 runtimes $0.20/deploy after 500, Enterprise $2000/mo custom unlimited. Harness GitOps Free 1 cluster, Team $20/user/mo, Enterprise $100/user/mo. Akuity Managed Argo $200/mo per instance.

Container Network Interface (CNI) Plugin

Pricing & free-tier limitsCilium/Calico/Flannel OSS Free unlimited nodes self-hosted. Calico Cloud Free up to 2 clusters 25 nodes, Team $300/mo up to 50 nodes, Enterprise $600/mo up to 200 nodes + custom. Cilium Enterprise $49k/yr per cluster up to 100 nodes, then $350-500/node/yr over, includes network policy, Hubble, LB, encryption, WireGuard. No per-GB fee.

API Gateway for Kubernetes

Pricing & free-tier limitsKong/Traefik/Envoy Gateway OSS Free. Kong Konnect Free 1M gateway reqs/mo, Plus $250/mo includes 5M reqs + $0.15/M after + $75/service pack. Traefik Cloud free limited. Gloo Gateway OSS Free, Enterprise $35k/yr per cluster 100 nodes. AWS API Gateway HTTP $1.00/M reqs + $0.09/GB out, REST $3.50/M + $0.09/GB, free tier 1M/mo 12mo. Overage per request.

Distributed Tracing for Containers

Pricing & free-tier limitsJaeger/Tempo/OTel OSS Free unlimited traces + S3 storage $0.023/GB-mo. Grafana Cloud Free 50GB traces/mo then $0.50/GB ingest + $0.08/GB retention. Honeycomb Free up to 20M events/mo, Pro $100/mo includes 30M events then $0.0001/event ($0.10/1000). Datadog APM $31/host/mo + $1.70/GB traces ingested, 50GB free with infra. New Relic Free 100GB ingest.

Cost Optimization & FinOps for K8s

Pricing & free-tier limitsOpenCost OSS Free unlimited cost allocation. Kubecost Free up to 1 cluster unlimited nodes community self-hosted, Team $449/mo per cluster, Enterprise $999/mo per cluster + support + SLA, Cloud Team $199/mo, Cloud Enterprise $599/mo. CAST AI Free inventory tier, Optimizer $0.11/vCPU-hr fee after savings min $1000/mo. Spot Ocean $0.30/vCPU-hr savings based billing ~20% of savings. No per-metric fee.

Multi-Cluster Management

Pricing & free-tier limitsClusterAPI/Rancher Community/Karmada OSS Free unlimited clusters self-hosted free compute ~$50/mo management VM. Rancher Prime $150/node/yr commercial support 24/7 or $31k/yr starter 100 nodes. RH Advanced Cluster Management $10k/yr per cluster + OpenShift Platform Plus $57k/yr per 10 cores ~$5.7k/core/yr. Gardener free OSS.

Image Signing & Supply Chain Security (Sigstore)

Pricing & free-tier limitsCosign/Fulcio/Rekor/SLSA OSS Free unlimited signatures Public Good includes free OIDC no cost, self-hosted storage $0.023/GB S3. Chainguard Enforce Free 5 nodes enforce policies, Team $1500/mo up to 100 nodes $15/node/mo, Enterprise $5000/mo unlimited + SLA, $5/attestation over. Docker Scout Policy needs Pro Team $35/user/mo. Anchore Enterprise $35k/yr.

Kubernetes Operator Lifecycle / Helm Registry

Pricing & free-tier limitsOLM/Helm/Artifact Hub OSS Free unlimited charts/operators. Portainer Community Free up to 3 nodes 1 cluster, Business $5.49/node/mo min 10 nodes $659/yr per 12 nodes billed annually $6588/yr ~$549/mo 10 nodes, Enterprise custom. Lens Desktop Pro $15/user/mo $180/yr. Helm OCI registry storage ECR $0.10/GB-mo. OperatorHub.io free.

Container Firewall / Runtime Security

Pricing & free-tier limitsFalco/Tetragon OSS Free unlimited security events self-hosted. Sysdig Secure Free 1 node trial, Team $0.40/workload/hr ~$14/host/mo, $0.45/container/hr? Actually SaaS ~$552/host/yr Team $40/host/mo, Enterprise $35/host/mo $420/host/yr 100 hosts = $42k/yr. Aqua Cloud Native $1500/mo starter 50 nodes $30/node/mo, then $45/node/mo. Wiz Runtime included in CNAPP $30k/yr base. Logs S3 $0.023/GB.

Kubernetes Certificate Management (cert-manager)

Pricing & free-tier limitscert-manager OSS Free unlimited certs self-hosted. Let's Encrypt Free 50 certs/domain/wk, wildcard via DNS-01 free, rate limit 300 orders/3h. Venafi Cloud Free 1 env up to 100 certs, then $0.20/certificate/mo after 100, SaaS $30k/yr starter. AWS ACM Private CA $400/mo per CA + $0.75/private cert issued, public ACM free for ELB/CloudFront. ZeroSSL free 3 90-day certs.

Service Mesh Enterprise Control Plane (Multi-cluster)

Pricing & free-tier limitsIstio/Linkerd/Cilium Cluster Mesh OSS Free unlimited multi-cluster mesh self-hosted. Tetrate Service Bridge $75k/yr per mesh (~100 workloads) Standard, Enterprise $150k/yr unlimited workloads + SLA + FIPS, $750/workload/yr over. Solo Gloo Mesh Enterprise $60k/yr per cluster up to 100 nodes + $650/node/yr over 100 + $15k support. No per-request fee.

Kubernetes Compliance & Audit Logging

Pricing & free-tier limitsFalco + OpenSearch + Loki OSS Free self-hosted ~$0.10/GB storage + $0.023/GB S3. Elastic Cloud Serverless Security $95/mo includes 2GB RAM + $0.12/GB ingest + SIEM free tier. Wiz Compliance included in CNAPP $30k/yr starter base + $5/compute/mo + audit $5k/yr. Prisma Compute Enterprise $48k/yr up to 100 hosts $480/host/yr after. Datadog Cloud SIEM $0.40/GB logs ingested + $5/analyzed host/mo + $5/CSPM resource.

Container Platform / Internal Developer Portal (IDP)

Pricing & free-tier limitsBackstage OSS Free unlimited users self-hosted compute $20-50/mo VM. Portainer Community Free up to 3 nodes, Business $5.49/node/mo $65.88/node/yr min 10 nodes $6588/yr annual. Harness IDP Team $20/user/mo, Enterprise $100/user/mo includes 50 IDP users ~$5k/mo + $5000 base. Cortex Free up to 50 catalog entities, Pro $10/entity/mo after + $500/mo base, Enterprise $30k/yr. No per-deployment fee.

Cross-Cloud / Hybrid Kubernetes Networking

Pricing & free-tier limitsSubmariner/Cilium Mesh/WireGuard OSS Free + VM egress $0.09/GB. Tailscale Free 3 users 100 devices 1/100GB log collection, Personal Pro $6/user/mo, Teams $10/user/mo + $0.15/GB over 100GB + $5/month subnet. Aviatrix $0.30/hr per gateway ~$219/mo per GW + $0.12/GB processed, Enterprise $100k/yr base 25 GWs. Volterra $0.50/vCPU-hr + $0.10/GB egress. No per-cluster fee OSS.

Container Registry Mirroring / Pull-Through Cache

Pricing & free-tier limitsHarbor/Registry OSS Free unlimited caching + storage S3 $0.023/GB-mo + $0.09/GB egress + VM $5-20/mo. Dragonfly P2P OSS Free reduces egress 80%. Nexus OSS Free self-hosted. JFrog Cloud Free up to 2GB storage 10GB transfer, Pro $98/mo 15GB storage 150GB transfer then $2/GB storage/mo + $0.35/GB transfer over, Enterprise $300/mo 50GB storage 500GB transfer. Artifactory CE free.

Chaos Engineering for Kubernetes

Pricing & free-tier limitsLitmusChaos/Chaos Mesh OSS Free unlimited experiments self-hosted + small VM $5/mo. Gremlin Free up to 5 services, Team $3000/mo 25 services $120/service/mo, Enterprise $10000/mo unlimited. Steadybit Free 1 team 3 targets, Pro $1500/mo 20 targets + $75/target/mo, Enterprise $4500/mo. No per-chaos fee OSS.

GPU / ML Workload Orchestration for Containers

Pricing & free-tier limitsKubeflow/Volcano/GPU Operator OSS Free + GPU hardware cost. AWS p3.2xlarge V100 $3.06/hr on-demand, g5.xlarge A10G $1.006/hr, g6.xlarge L4 $0.805/hr, spot 60-70% off ~$0.35-1.22/hr. GCP a2-highgpu-1g $3.67/hr + $2.93/GPU/hr, g2-standard-4 $0.485/hr + $0.71/GPU/hr. Run:ai Community Free up to 8 GPUs, Enterprise $15k/mo up to 100 GPUs $150/GPU/mo, NVIDIA Run:ai $450/GPU/yr licensing.

Enterprise Kubernetes Support / SLA & Extended Security

Pricing & free-tier limitsCommunity Free $0 self-support. Rancher Prime $150/node/yr commercial 24/7 up to $31k/yr starter 100 nodes + $450/node/yr over. OpenShift Platform Plus $57k/yr per 10 physical cores bare metal ~$5.7k/core/yr, ROSA AWS $0.171/hr cluster ~$124/mo + $0.13/hr per 4 vCPU worker ~$94/mo worker + $0.34/hr infra. Tanzu Standard $1000/vCPU/yr ~$4000/node/yr. Mirantis $1200/node/yr support. Extended security patches $600/node/yr.

Options and prices come straight from our research sheets for a enterprise containers and kubernetes project. Prices are estimates and change often — always confirm on the provider's page before committing.

How this enterprise containers and kubernetes checklist works.

Each requirement below is something a enterprise containers and kubernetes build typically needs. Pick one of the four researched options — recommended, free, cheaper or paid — add your own with "Other", or skip the requirement if your project doesn't need it. Nothing is mandatory; the plan on the right tracks what you've decided so nothing gets forgotten.

Your picks are saved in this browser automatically, so you can come back anytime. Options are researched per build level and refreshed as vendors change their plans — always verify details on the provider's page before committing.