AWS EKS Pricing Calculator 2025: Estimate Your EKS Breakdown

The pricing page for Amazon EKS is simple on the surface but complex in reality. You often search for “aws kubernetes pricing” and find the standard “$0.10 per hour” rate.

But your bill is never just the Control Plane. It is the sum of:

1. EKS Control Plane (The fixed cluster cost).
2. Worker Nodes (EC2 or Fargate).
3. Networking (The hidden tax).

This guide (and calculator) helps you estimate the real AWS EKS pricing in 2025.

[!TIP] Skip the Math Don’t want to build a spreadsheet? Use our free Interactive Kubernetes Cost Estimator to model your specific cluster configuration in seconds.

The Core Components of EKS Pricing

Your EKS bill is composed of four main categories. Understanding how each scales is key to predicting your costs.

1. The Control Plane (The “Entry Fee”)

Every EKS cluster costs $0.10 per hour.

• Monthly Cost: ~$73.00 per cluster.
• Scaling: Flat rate. It doesn’t matter if you have 1 node or 1,000 nodes.
• Optimization: Run fewer, larger clusters (multi-tenancy) instead of many small clusters per team/env.

2. Compute (The “Meat”)

This is usually 70-80% of your bill. You pay for the EC2 instances or Fargate resources that run your pods.

• EC2: You pay standard EC2 rates for the underlying instances.
• Fargate: You pay a premium for “serverless” compute, calculated by vCPU and Memory usage per pod.

3. Networking (The “Silent Killer”)

• Load Balancers: ALB/NLB hourly rates + LCU (Load Balancer Capacity Units) processing fees.
• NAT Gateways: Hourly rates + Data Processing fees for private subnets.
• Data Transfer: Cross-AZ traffic (inter-node communication) and Egress to the internet.

4. Storage (The “State”)

• EBS Volumes: GP3 storage for Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs).
• EFS: Elastic File System for shared storage (expensive!).

Compute Deep Dive: EC2 vs. Fargate vs. Spot

Choosing the right compute engine is the single biggest lever you have for cost control.

Option A: EC2 On-Demand (The Standard)

You provision EC2 instances (e.g., m6i.xlarge) and join them to the cluster as Worker Nodes.

• Pros: Predictable performance, full control over node OS, supports DaemonSets.
• Cons: You pay for the entire instance, even if it’s only 10% utilized. Bin-packing is your responsibility.
• Cost: Standard EC2 pricing.

Option B: EKS Fargate (The “Serverless” Option)

You don’t manage nodes. AWS provisions a micro-VM for each pod.

• Pros: No OS patching, no bin-packing, pay only for what you request.
• Cons: Expensive. Per-vCPU cost is ~20-40% higher than EC2. No DaemonSets support. Strict resource limits.
• Verdict: Good for sporadic batch jobs or small dev environments. usually too expensive for high-scale production.

Option C: EC2 Spot Instances (The “Savings” Option)

You use spare AWS capacity for up to 90% off On-Demand prices.

• Pros: Massive savings.
• Cons: Instances can be terminated with 2 minutes notice.
• Verdict: Essential for cost optimization. Use Spot for stateless web apps, workers, and batch jobs. Use On-Demand only for stateful apps (DBs) and cluster management tools.

Price Comparison (us-east-1, 4 vCPU / 16GB RAM)

[!IMPORTANT] The Spot Strategy The most cost-effective EKS cluster uses a Mixed Instance Policy. Run your critical system pods (CoreDNS, metrics-server) on a small On-Demand node group, and your application workloads on a Spot node group.

The 4 Hidden Costs of EKS

These are the line items that don’t appear on the main pricing page but will show up on your bill.

1. Cross-AZ Data Transfer

In AWS, data transfer within the same Availability Zone (AZ) is free. Data transfer between AZs costs $0.01/GB.

• The Trap: Kubernetes is designed for High Availability. It spreads pods across AZs by default. If Service A (AZ 1) talks to Service B (AZ 2), you pay.
• The Fix: Use Topology Aware Hints to keep traffic local to an AZ where possible.

2. NAT Gateway Processing

If your nodes are in private subnets (security best practice), they need a NAT Gateway to talk to the internet (e.g., to pull Docker images or talk to 3rd party APIs).

• The Cost: $0.045/GB processed + $0.045/hour per gateway.
• The Fix: Use VPC Endpoints for S3, ECR, and DynamoDB to bypass the NAT Gateway.

3. Monitoring & Logging (CloudWatch)

By default, EKS control plane logs are disabled. If you enable them, they go to CloudWatch Logs.

• The Cost: $0.50/GB ingested + storage costs.
• The Fix: Only enable the logs you strictly need (e.g., Audit logs) and set a short retention period (e.g., 7 days).

4. Load Balancer Fragmentation

Every Kubernetes Service of type LoadBalancer provisions a classic ELB or NLB/ALB.

• The Cost: ~$16/month minimum per service.
• The Fix: Use an Ingress Controller (like Nginx or ALB Controller). This lets you share a single Load Balancer across dozens of services.

EKS Pricing Calculator (Manual Formula)

If you want to build your own spreadsheet, here is the formula:

Total Monthly Cost =
  (0.10 * 730)                                      # Control Plane
+ (Node_Count * Instance_Rate * 730)                # Compute
+ (Storage_GB * 0.08)                               # EBS GP3
+ (Load_Balancers * 0.0225 * 730)                   # ALB/NLB Hourly
+ (NAT_Gateways * 0.045 * 730)                      # NAT Hourly
+ (Data_Transfer_GB * 0.01)                         # Cross-AZ
+ (NAT_Processing_GB * 0.045)                       # NAT Traffic

Example Scenarios

1. The “Startup” Cluster (Dev/Staging)

• Config: 3x t3.medium nodes (Spot), 1 NAT Gateway, 1 ALB.
• Breakdown:
  • Control Plane: $73
  • Compute: $30 (Spot)
  • Network: $50 (NAT + ALB)
• Total: ~$153 / month

2. The “Scale-Up” Cluster (Production)

• Config: 10x m6i.xlarge (50/50 Spot/OD), 3 NAT Gateways (HA), 2 ALBs, 1TB Data Transfer.
• Breakdown:
  • Control Plane: $73
  • Compute: $935 (5 OD @ $140 + 5 Spot @ $47)
  • Network: $200 (NATs + ALBs + Transfer)
• Total: ~$1,208 / month

FAQ: Common EKS Pricing Questions

Is EKS cheaper than ECS?

Generally, ECS is cheaper for smaller workloads because it has no control plane fee. EKS becomes cost-competitive once your compute spend dwarfs the $73/month fee (usually around 3-5 nodes).

How do I stop paying for the EKS Control Plane?

You can’t, unless you use a self-managed Kubernetes distribution (like kOps) on EC2, but then you pay in engineering hours. The $73 fee is generally considered worth it for the management overhead it saves.

Does EKS charge for stopped nodes?

No. You only pay for EC2 instances while they are in running state. However, you do pay for the EBS volumes attached to them even if the instance is stopped.

What is the cheapest EKS node type?

For x86, the t3 and t3a (AMD) burstable families are cheapest. For production, m6g (Graviton/ARM) instances offer the best price/performance ratio, often 20% cheaper than Intel equivalents.

Summary and Next Steps

EKS is a powerful platform, but it requires active cost management.

1. Right-size your instances.
2. Use Spot for stateless workloads.
3. Consolidate Load Balancers with Ingress.
4. Monitor NAT Gateway and Cross-AZ traffic.

Ready to see your real numbers? Try our Kubernetes Cost Estimator now.