Estimate monthly Google Kubernetes Engine costs for Standard and Autopilot clusters.
Last verified: April 2026
Internet egress. First 1 GB free, then $0.12/GB.
Output will appear here...The GKE Cost Estimator calculates monthly costs for Google Kubernetes Engine clusters in both Standard and Autopilot modes. It covers cluster management fees, node pool compute costs, and GKE-specific features like GKE Enterprise. The tool compares Standard (self-managed nodes) vs. Autopilot (Google-managed nodes) pricing to help you choose the right mode.
Your team runs 3 GKE Standard clusters: production (8 n2-standard-8 nodes), staging (4 n2-standard-4 nodes), and dev (4 n2-standard-4 nodes). The estimator shows total cost at $2,850/month. You merge staging and dev into one cluster with separate namespaces (saving $73/month in management fees and 4 idle nodes). You convert the merged cluster to Autopilot and switch the production node pool to Spot VMs for stateless workloads. New total: $1,420/month — a 50% reduction.
Autopilot pricing is per-pod-resource, not per-node, so you pay only for what your pods request. But Autopilot enforces minimum resource requests (250m CPU, 512 MiB memory per container) that can inflate costs for lightweight sidecars and init containers. If you have 50 pods each with a tiny logging sidecar, Autopilot charges for 50 x 250m CPU even if the sidecar uses 10m. In Standard mode, those sidecars share node resources with no extra cost.
GKE cluster management fees are often overlooked: $0.10/hour per cluster ($73/month). If you have 5 clusters for different environments, that's $365/month before any compute. Consider using namespaces and RBAC to consolidate dev/staging into fewer clusters, or use Autopilot where the management fee is the same but you avoid paying for idle node capacity.
Spot VMs in GKE node pools offer 60-91% savings but can be preempted. The key to reliability: use multiple Spot node pools with different machine types (e.g., n2-standard-4 and e2-standard-4) and enable node auto-provisioning. If one machine type is reclaimed, GKE automatically provisions from another type. This approach gives you Spot savings with near-on-demand reliability.
The estimator calculates GKE costs by summing cluster management fees (per-cluster hourly rate), node compute costs (machine type hourly rate x node count x hours, with Sustained Use Discounts applied for Standard mode), and Autopilot pod resource charges (per-vCPU-second and per-GiB-second rates based on pod requests). For Standard mode, it models autoscaler behavior by averaging between minimum and maximum node counts based on a configurable utilization target.
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