What Does Kubernetes Cost for Small Businesses?
What Does Kubernetes Cost for Small Businesses?
Container orchestration with Kubernetes is the industry standard for deploying modern applications. But the pricing models of the major cloud providers are built for enterprise budgets — not for small and medium-sized businesses. If you’re a five-person team running three microservices, AWS or Azure can easily run into four figures per month.
In this article, we break down what Kubernetes actually costs — and where a managed Kubernetes namespace offers a compelling alternative.
Three Common Paths to Kubernetes
1. Self-Hosted on Your Own Servers
You rent bare-metal servers or VMs and install Kubernetes yourself — using kubeadm, k3s, or Rancher. It sounds cheap because you only pay for the servers.
What’s often overlooked:
- Time spent on setup and maintenance: Updates, etcd backups, certificate rotation, monitoring stack — all on you.
- Downtime risk: Without a redundant control plane, cluster failure is a matter of when, not if.
- Hidden labor costs: An experienced DevOps engineer costs €70,000–90,000/year. Even dedicating a quarter of their time to cluster maintenance adds €1,500/month.
Realistic total cost: €150–300/month infrastructure + significant time investment.
2. Managed Kubernetes from Hyperscalers (AWS EKS, GKE, AKS)
The major cloud providers handle the control plane for you. In return, you pay a base fee — plus compute, storage, and networking.
AWS EKS example for a typical SMB workload (2 vCPU, 4 GiB RAM, 20 GiB storage):
| Item | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| EKS Control Plane | $73 |
| EC2 t3.medium (2 vCPU, 4 GiB) | ~$30 |
| EBS Storage 20 GiB | ~$2 |
| Load Balancer (ALB) | ~$22 |
| Egress 50 GiB | ~$4.50 |
| Total | ~$131.50 |
That’s the minimum configuration. High availability doubles your compute costs. Add ECR for container images, CloudWatch for logs, and — not to forget — the learning curve for IAM roles, VPC configuration, and the dozens of AWS-specific abstractions.
Realistic for SMBs: $150–400/month, plus onboarding time into the AWS ecosystem.
3. Managed Kubernetes Namespace with ITSH
With ITSH, you don’t rent an entire cluster. Instead, you get an isolated namespace on a professionally operated cluster in German data centers.
ITSH cost breakdown for the same workload (2 vCPU, 4 GiB RAM, 20 GiB storage, 50 GiB egress):
| Item | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Base fee (PAYG) | €3.00 |
| 2 vCPU (730 h) | €21.90 |
| 4 GiB RAM (730 h) | €14.60 |
| 20 GiB Storage | €1.60 |
| 50 GiB Egress | €0.50 |
| Total | €41.60 |
Alternatively, the Starter plan at €19/month already includes 1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM, and 10 GiB storage — more than enough for many small projects.
Cost Comparison at a Glance
| Self-Hosted | AWS EKS | ITSH Namespace | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base fee | €0 | ~€67 ($73) | €3 (PAYG) |
| Compute (2 vCPU, 4 GiB) | ~€80 (VPS) | ~€55 ($30 + ALB) | €36.50 |
| Storage 20 GiB | included | ~€2 | €1.60 |
| Egress 50 GiB | included | ~€4 | €0.50 |
| Monthly total | ~€80 + labor | ~€128 | ~€41.60 |
| Ops overhead | High | Medium | None |
| GDPR compliance | Your responsibility | Complicated (US provider) | Included (German DC) |
What’s Included in an ITSH Namespace?
The price isn’t just lower — it includes services that other providers charge extra for:
- ArgoCD/GitOps integration: Deploy via git push, no separate CI/CD pipeline needed for cluster management.
- Daily backups: Automatic, zero configuration.
- Auto-scaling: Pods scale on demand, you only pay for actual usage.
- 24/7 monitoring: Prometheus and alerting come pre-configured.
- TLS certificates: Automatic via Let’s Encrypt through the gateway controller.
When Does Each Model Make Sense?
Self-hosted is worth it if you already have a DevOps team and need full control over the cluster — for example, due to specific compliance requirements or GPU workloads.
AWS/GKE/AKS makes sense if you’re already deeply invested in a hyperscaler’s ecosystem and budget isn’t a constraint.
A managed namespace with ITSH is the right choice if you:
- Want to run containers in production without managing an entire cluster
- Value European data centers and GDPR compliance
- Have a limited budget (startups, agencies, SMBs)
- Don’t employ a dedicated DevOps team
Worked Example: SaaS Startup with Three Microservices
A typical setup — API backend, worker service, frontend container:
# Estimated resource requirements
API: 0.5 vCPU, 512 MiB RAM
Worker: 0.5 vCPU, 1 GiB RAM
Frontend: 0.25 vCPU, 256 MiB RAM
Storage: 10 GiB (database PVC)
Egress: 30 GiB/month
Monthly cost on ITSH (PAYG):
- Base fee: €3.00
- 1.25 vCPU × 730 h × €0.015: €13.69
- 1.75 GiB RAM × 730 h × €0.005: €6.39
- 10 GiB Storage: €0.80
- 30 GiB Egress: €0.30
- Total: €24.18/month
The same setup on AWS EKS: at least $110/month — four times the price.
Conclusion
Kubernetes doesn’t have to be expensive. If you don’t need the full feature catalog of a hyperscaler and simply want to run containers reliably with GDPR compliance, a managed namespace is a significantly cheaper alternative.
Starting at €3/month, you can get up and running on ITSH immediately — no cluster setup, no hidden costs, no vendor lock-in with a US provider.