Estimate monthly AKS cluster costs including node pools, load balancers, and managed fees.
Last verified: April 2026
Total nodes = nodes per pool x pool count
OS disk per node (Standard HDD $0.04/GB/mo)
99.95% SLA for API server (included in Standard/Premium tiers)
Output will appear here...The estimator models AKS costs across five components: control plane tier (Free at $0 or Standard at $0.10/hr), node pool compute (VM size hourly rate x node count for each pool, with RI pricing options), Standard Load Balancer (per-rule and per-GB data processing fees), managed disk storage (per-GB rate for persistent volumes), and optional add-ons (Container Insights ingestion, ACR per-image storage). It calculates autoscaler cost variance by modeling min/max node counts with a utilization-based average.
The Azure AKS Cost Estimator calculates monthly costs for Azure Kubernetes Service clusters including control plane fees, node pool compute, load balancers, and managed add-ons. It supports Standard and Free tier control planes, multiple node pools with different VM sizes, and factors in uptime SLA costs. The tool helps you compare configurations and identify cost optimization opportunities before provisioning clusters.
Your production AKS cluster runs 6 Standard_D8s_v5 nodes (system + user pools) with Container Insights enabled. The estimator shows $2,100/month — $1,600 in compute, $115 in Container Insights, $73 in control plane (Standard tier), and $312 in load balancer and disk costs. You discover that 3 nodes are running Spot-eligible batch jobs. Moving those to a Spot pool saves $560/month. Adding 1-year RIs for the remaining 3 on-demand nodes saves another $380. New total: $1,160/month — a 45% reduction.
AKS requires at least one system node pool for cluster add-ons (CoreDNS, metrics-server, etc.). System pools need at least 3 nodes for production reliability, even if your workloads only need 2. Budget for these 'tax' nodes — on Standard_DS2_v2 that's roughly $300/month in nodes doing nothing but running cluster infrastructure.
Spot node pools on AKS can save 60-90% but have a gotcha: Azure can evict ALL Spot nodes simultaneously during a capacity crunch. Unlike AWS where interruptions are typically individual instances, Azure Spot evictions can hit an entire VM size in a region at once. Always run critical workloads on a separate on-demand user node pool with appropriate taints and tolerations.
Azure Monitor Container Insights costs $2.30 per GB of log data ingested. A 10-node cluster with verbose logging can easily generate 50+ GB/month ($115). Configure log filtering to exclude health check logs, kube-system namespace noise, and stdout from chatty containers. Alternatively, use the cost-optimized Basic Logs tier for container logs at $0.50/GB.
The AKS Free tier provides a control plane at no cost but without an uptime SLA or advanced features. The Standard tier costs approximately $0.10/hour and includes a 99.95% uptime SLA (with availability zones), Cluster Autoscaler, and advanced networking features. The Premium tier adds long-term support.
Beyond node VM costs, budget for the Standard Load Balancer (rules and data processing), managed disks for persistent volumes, container registry (ACR), egress data transfer, and optional add-ons like Azure Monitor Container Insights and Azure Policy for AKS.
Use Spot node pools for fault-tolerant workloads, right-size nodes based on actual resource requests, enable the cluster autoscaler, use Azure Reserved VM Instances for baseline capacity, and consider B-series VMs for development clusters.
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