Cost optimization
Wholesale AWS pricing, spot placement, free Starter clusters, and transparent Production platform fees. Know what you'll pay before you ship.
Ownkube is built around a simple premise: you pay AWS directly for compute, with a transparent platform fee on Production and no Ownkube fee on Starter. No markup, no opaque bundles, no surprise usage tiers.
See your current spend at Billing.
The cost model in one paragraph
AWS bills you for the underlying compute (EC2, storage, bandwidth) at their standard rates. Any credits you have (AWS Activate, committed-use discounts) apply directly. Ownkube adds a transparent platform fee on top: $5 / vCPU + $1 / GB RAM on the Production shape (EKS), metered per second on requested resources. Starter clusters (K3s on one AWS instance) are free, with no Ownkube platform fee at all.
See Pricing for the full breakdown.
Where the savings come from
No compute markup
Traditional PaaS marks up AWS compute 3 to 5 times. Ownkube doesn't. You pay wholesale for the instance and a transparent platform fee on Production only.
Starter is free
A Starter cluster (K3s on one AWS instance) runs unlimited apps, workers, and databases with no Ownkube platform fee. You only pay AWS for the EC2 instance.
Cost agent watches the bill
Right-sizes over-provisioned workloads, auto-sleeps idle envs, and flags spend anomalies before they hit the monthly bill. Covers recurring FinOps work a DevOps engineer would otherwise do by hand.
Scaling agent without waste
Replica-level and node-level scaling means you only pay for capacity you're using. The Scaling agent owns this. See Autoscaling.
Burn AWS credits efficiently
Every dollar of AWS Activate or other startup credits applies directly to your compute bill at wholesale rates. Credits expire in 12 to 24 months, redeem them against real EC2, S3, and bandwidth instead of letting them lapse.
Skip the $200K DevOps hire
A US senior DevOps engineer runs $180K to $250K loaded. The Cost and Scaling agents cover the ops work day to day, so a 5- to 20-person team can stay on engineers building product.
A worked example
A small app (one web service + one worker + one Postgres database) on a Starter cluster (K3s on one AWS instance):
| Component | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| Ownkube platform fee | $0 (free) |
EC2 t3.medium (2 vCPU / 4 GiB) | ~$30 |
| EBS storage (30 GB gp3) | ~$3 |
| Outbound bandwidth (modest) | ~$2 |
| Total | ~$35 |
Adding another web service or worker to the same node: $0 extra. That's the wedge over per-service PaaS pricing.
On Production at scale
For a production workload running 8 vCPU / 16 GiB across multiple services on Production (EKS):
| Component | Monthly cost |
|---|---|
| EKS control plane | ~$73 |
| Worker nodes (mixed on-demand + spot) | ~$150-200 |
| Ownkube platform fee: 8 vCPU x $5 + 16 GB x $1 | $56 |
| Total | ~$280-330 |
The platform fee ramps linearly with requested resources, billed per second from the first second.
Cost visibility in the dashboard
The Billing page shows:
- Month-to-date spend by cluster and environment
- Projected monthly total based on current usage
- Per-cluster breakdown: platform fee, compute, storage
- AWS usage proxy: approximate AWS compute cost derived from the resources Ownkube provisioned (actual AWS bill comes from AWS)
On the Cost agent's roadmap
The Cost agent ships in stages. Today it surfaces month-to-date spend and projected monthly total per cluster. Next:
- Auto-sleep schedules for non-production environments during off-hours. Example output: "3 staging envs idle since 8pm. Auto-slept. ~$127/mo saved this week."
- Right-sizing recommendations to flag deployments with chronically low utilization. Example output: "api-worker over-provisioned: 2GB allocated, 340MB peak. Right-size to save ~$18/mo."
- Cost anomaly alerts when spend jumps outside its normal band. Example output: "EKS data-transfer-out 4x higher than 7-day baseline. Investigate before month-end."
Limits and constraints
- Actual AWS billing comes from AWS. Ownkube's dashboard shows an approximation, not the canonical bill.
- Reserved instances and Savings Plans you purchase on AWS apply directly; Ownkube doesn't need to know about them
- Compute markup is zero. This is the wedge and we're not changing it.
Pricing
Full rate card, free tier, and plan comparison.
Clusters
Starter vs Production, including which cluster shape to pick for your budget.
Don't see a feature you need? Email support@ownkube.io. Ownkube is shaped by the teams using it and we ship what our users ask for.