The “big three” managed Kubernetes services — Amazon EKS, Google GKE and Azure AKS — are closer on price than their marketing suggests. Here’s the true cost breakdown.
Control plane: a near-tie
| Service | Control plane | Extended/LTS |
|---|---|---|
| AWS EKS | $0.10/cluster/hr (~$73/mo) | $0.60/hr extended support |
| Google GKE | $0.10/cluster/hr (1 free via credit) | — |
| Azure AKS | Free (Standard SLA $0.10/hr) | $0.60/hr Premium/LTS |
Snapshot captured June 2026 — verify on each vendor’s pricing page. On paper, AKS’s free tier wins and GKE’s credit ties it for one cluster, but this fee is the smallest part of most bills.
Worker nodes: where it’s actually decided
All three charge their normal VM rates for nodes:
- EKS: EC2, e.g. t3.medium
$0.0416/hr ($30/mo), or EKS Auto Mode / Fargate. - GKE: Compute Engine, e.g. e2-medium
$0.0335/hr ($24/mo); Autopilot bills per pod. - AKS: Azure VMs, e.g. Standard_B2s
$0.0416/hr ($30/mo).
For a steady 3-node cluster, nodes cost ~$72–$90/month — more than the control-plane fee. Compare any two directly: EKS vs GKE, EKS vs AKS, GKE vs AKS.
The hidden extras
- Load balancers: ALB/NLB, Cloud Load Balancing or Azure LB — roughly $16–$22/month plus usage.
- Egress: all three bill ~$0.09/GB after a small free tier; this can dwarf everything at scale.
- NAT gateways, storage, cross-AZ traffic: easy to overlook, frequently significant.
Verdict
The control-plane fee shouldn’t drive your decision between EKS, GKE and AKS — pick on ecosystem fit, then control nodes, egress and load balancers. If raw cost is the priority, a free-control-plane provider will usually beat all three. Model your plan in the calculator.