Kubecost

What is Kubecost?

Kubecost is Kubernetes cost monitoring and optimization software for platform and FinOps teams that need to allocate and reduce cluster spend. It began as an open-source project and is now IBM Kubecost from Apptio, an IBM company, with a reported 10 million+ installs.

Key features of Kubecost

• Cost visibility: real-time costs by cluster, team, namespace and workload, reconciled with the cloud bill.
• Showback and chargeback: allocate shared costs to teams.
• Optimization: finds over-provisioned workloads from real usage data.
• Automation: actions such as request sizing and namespace turndown.
• Governance: budgets, forecasting, anomaly detection, alerts and RBAC.
• Multi-environment: works across multi-cloud, hybrid and on-prem clusters.

How Kubecost works

Kubecost runs in the cluster, combines usage metrics with cloud billing or custom pricing, and reports cost by workload. Teams act on recommendations or automate sizing changes, with budgets and alerts for governance.

Who uses Kubecost?

Kubecost is used by platform engineers, DevOps and FinOps teams running Kubernetes on EKS, AKS, GKE and on-prem clusters.

Kubecost pricing

Kubecost lists Foundations as free for unlimited clusters up to 250 cores, with 15-day metric retention and community support. Enterprise Self-hosted is paid through the IBM store, and Enterprise Cloud is quoted by sales.

Kubecost integrations

Kubecost works with EKS, AKS, GKE and on-prem clusters and native cloud billing. The vendor mentions enterprise integrations for the paid tier without listing them.

Kubecost alternatives

Cast AI combines cost monitoring with automated cluster optimization. Datadog offers cloud cost management inside a broader observability suite. Komodor focuses on Kubernetes troubleshooting, and Infracost estimates cloud costs from infrastructure code.