EKS vs AKS vs GKE pricing: all three bill the control plane per cluster and hour, and on the read date it costs USD 0.10 at all three in the standard tier, so the differences lie in the tiers above it, in the surcharges for old versions, in the fees of the automatic operating modes and in the one credit only one of them grants. What the fee does not include is the same everywhere: nodes, disks, load balancers, addresses, traffic and logs sit under other services. This page puts the fees side by side in a table with its read date, explains the tiers and surcharges, and works an example across several clusters. The AWS service's pricing dimensions and usage types are under EKS, ECS and Fargate; what the providers charge for nodes and pods is compared in containers and Kubernetes.
How it works
| Fee, read on 2026-10-21 | Amazon EKS | AKS | GKE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Control plane, standard | USD 0.10 per cluster and hour | Free: USD 0; Standard: USD 0.10 per cluster and hour (Germany West Central) | USD 0.10 per cluster and hour, in one-second increments, for every cluster type |
| Credit | none | none | USD 74.40 per billing account and month, one zonal or Autopilot cluster |
| Old version | extended support USD 0.60 per cluster and hour, 12 months after 14 months of standard support | Premium with Long Term Support (24 months): USD 0.60 per cluster and hour | Extended release channel: USD 0.50 per cluster and hour on top after standard support ends, USD 0.60 in all |
| Larger control plane | Provisioned Control Plane XL USD 1.65, 2XL USD 3.40, 4XL USD 6.90, 8XL USD 13.90 per hour, on top | included in the tier | included in the tier |
| Automatic operation | EKS Auto Mode: management fee per launched instance and hour by instance type, USD 0.0138 for m6i.large in Frankfurt | AKS Automatic: USD 0.16 per cluster and hour for the hosted control plane plus a fee per vCPU and hour by VM category, USD 0.010193 for General Purpose | Autopilot: no fee beside the cluster fee; pods by requests, in Frankfurt USD 0.0573 per vCPU-hour and USD 0.0063421 per GiB-hour |
| SLA | included | Free without a financially backed SLA; Standard and Premium with the uptime SLA | included |
| Node limit | no tier difference | Free up to 1,000 nodes, recommended below 10; Standard and Premium up to 5,000 | no tier difference |
The standard fee is USD 0.10 per cluster and hour at all three, USD 73.00 in a 730-hour month; EKS and GKE bill it per second. The price is independent of the number of nodes and the load. GKE credits every billing account USD 74.40 a month, the value of one zonal or Autopilot cluster; regional Standard clusters and everything outside the fee get nothing from it. AKS charges nothing for the control plane in the Free tier, without a financially backed SLA, and is thereby the only provider with a cluster at no charge rather than a credit.
The surcharges for old versions are the same number at all three, USD 0.60 per hour, and arise differently: EKS moves a cluster into extended support automatically once its version is 14 months old, for another twelve months; GKE bills the surcharge only on the Extended release channel after the version has left standard support; AKS requires the Premium tier for Long Term Support, switched on together with the LTS plan. At one it is the consequence of a skipped upgrade, at the other a decision.
The automatic operating modes move the price from the control plane to the nodes: EKS Auto Mode and AKS Automatic bill per instance or per vCPU, Autopilot bills pods instead of nodes (Cluster autoscaler, Karpenter and node provisioning).
What it means for your cost
With one cluster the fee is a side issue: USD 73.00 a month beside nodes that cost many times that. With many clusters it becomes a factor, because it accrues per cluster and needs no load (non-production clusters); AKS Free for development clusters and the one GKE credit are then the only zeros in the table. The extended support surcharge turns a skipped upgrade into six cluster fees and is the one line of the table that appears with no change to the architecture; an upgrade cadence in step with the versions is therefore a cost decision.
The fee is also the part of cluster cost that is easiest to compare and decides least: nodes, disks, load balancers and traffic make up the rest, and they are billed by the price lists of the compute and network services, not by this table. Changing provider over the cluster fee never pays; changing tier within the provider, from Standard to Free for a test cluster or back out of Premium after an upgrade, costs nothing and shows next month. In billing data the fee is a line of its own under the provider's Kubernetes service and one of the shared cluster costs.
Where it goes wrong
- Surcharge without a decision. Symptom: the cluster fee rises from USD 0.10 to USD 0.60 per hour. Cause: the EKS version has passed its 14 months of standard support, or the GKE cluster sits on the Extended release channel past standard support.
- Credit expected wrongly. Symptom: the full GKE fee despite the credit. Cause: the credit applies once per billing account and only to zonal and Autopilot clusters.
- Premium without need. Symptom: an AKS cluster pays USD 0.60 per hour. Cause: the Premium tier was chosen for Long Term Support and not reset after the upgrade.
- Free in production. Symptom: a control plane outage with no claim. Cause: the Free tier has no financially backed SLA; it is meant for development and test.
- Fee confused with cluster cost. Symptom: a comparison of three providers rests on USD 0.10. Cause: the fee is the smallest item; nodes, traffic and disks decide.
- Auto Mode fee overlooked. Symptom: lines per instance appear under Amazon EKS. Cause: the EKS Auto Mode management fee runs per launched instance and hour beside the cluster fee.
Example
List prices from the table above, read on 2026-10-21. Twelve clusters in standard support cost at Amazon EKS 12 × 0.10 × 730 = USD 876.00 a month; at AKS in the Standard tier the same USD 876.00, with four development clusters in the Free tier USD 584.00; at GKE 876.00 − 74.40 = USD 801.60 with the credit, provided at least one cluster is zonal or Autopilot. If three of the twelve EKS clusters slip into extended support, they cost 3 × 0.60 × 730 = USD 1,314.00 instead of USD 219.00, and the account's fee rises from USD 876.00 to USD 1,971.00 a month.
Sources
Read on 2026-10-21. Amazon EKS pricing, AWS Price List bulk API, offer AmazonEKS, eu-central-1, Microsoft AKS cluster management pricing tiers and Azure Retail Prices API, Google Cloud GKE pricing.