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Kubernetes has become the industry’s de facto standard for container management. Thanks to its ease of use and rich set of features, it’s simple to deploy and can scale and adapt to any range of needs. It has become mission-critical for microservices-based products seeking to deliver more value to end users in less time.
Despite its scalability and flexibility, managing costs in Kubernetes environments can be complex. One of the biggest challenges is achieving cost transparency and observability. Cloud provider invoices typically break down expenses by services like AWS EC2, EKS, or GCP Compute Engine, but they lack insight into the actual Kubernetes workloads driving those costs. This makes it difficult to connect cloud spending to specific applications or business metrics, such as unit economics.
In this blog post, we’ll explore why Kubernetes cost monitoring is so challenging and highlight leading tools that can help improve visibility and optimize spending. Whether you're struggling with cost allocation or workload efficiency, this guide will provide practical insights to streamline your Kubernetes cost management efforts.
Kubernetes Cost Management Challenges in 2025
The biggest hurdle to scaling Kubernetes deployments remains the rapid and often unpredictable rise in costs. A recent survey of 178 organizations found that over two-thirds reported increased Kubernetes expenses in the past year – with half experiencing a surge of more than 20%.
Kubernetes delivers immense value by enabling DevOps teams to rapidly deploy innovative applications, leveraging disposable and replaceable compute resources across diverse infrastructures. However, this flexibility introduces a paradox – while Kubernetes enhances scalability, it often leads to inefficient resource provisioning, making cost control difficult. In contrast, traditional cloud resource management was easier to track but lacked the agility and scalability that modern businesses demand.
Here’s a breakdown of the key Kubernetes cost observability challenges to watch out for in 2025:
- Allocating total cost: Kubernetes dynamically creates, scales, and discards container instances based on demand, ensuring scalability and flexibility. However, this volatility makes tracking actual resource usage difficult and makes it difficult to distribute overhead expenses fairly. The constant fluctuation in resources complicates accurate cost attribution across workloads.
- Abstraction of Kubernetes: Kubernetes introduces an abstraction layer between infrastructure and applications through APIs. Users interact with namespaces, deployments, and StatefulSets, while Kubernetes orchestrates pods, load balancers, and storage volumes behind the scenes. This abstraction enhances scalability but obscures the true cost of underlying components, requiring specialized tools to trace costs through these layers
- Multi-cloud environments: Kubernetes can operate across multiple public cloud providers, on-premises environments, or hybrid setups. This flexibility can lead to fragmented billing across different platforms, complicating the process of associating specific costs with individual clusters or containers. Consolidating these expenses into a cohesive overview becomes a significant challenge.
- Savings insights and opportunities: Resource requests for CPU and memory during deployment don’t always reflect actual usage, often resulting in over-provisioning and waste. Given Kubernetes’ dynamic nature, continuously monitoring and adjusting resource allocations must be automated to ensure efficiency and cost savings. Without automated insights, businesses risk underutilizing resources and inflating expenses.
Fortunately, some powerful tools are on the market to help overcome these challenges. Read on to see what such tools should offer as well as how various popular solutions meet these requirements.
Key Features, Functions, and Tradeoffs to Look Out For
Kubernetes doesn’t offer built-in cost observability, but several tools can help track and allocate the costs of running cloud-native applications. When selecting a solution to manage Kubernetes costs, consider the following key factors:
- Installation: Cost observability tools should be easy to install and manage, but they must do so with minimal intrusion on the cluster itself to limit performance and security concerns.
- Configuration difficulty: Configuration is critical for Kubernetes cost monitoring and cloud provider monitoring since a faulty configuration results in mistaken calculations and estimations.
- Cost visibility per resource: One of the critical characteristics of cost observability is the ability to accurately calculate the costs per pod, deployment, namespace, and other resources in a cluster. For this, you need a tool that supports proper resource labeling.
- Connection to external billing: Your Kubernetes monitoring tool should connect to your cloud provider’s billing system. Your AWS bill, for example, has cost information that’s essential to accurate Kubernetes costing, even if it’s not comprehensive by itself.
- Open-source and community: Kubernetes is an open-source platform with an active community, and its popularity stems from this. Third-party cost observability tools often use different licensing models and typically charge a monthly fee.
Cloud vendor-provided tools offer limited Kubernetes cost visibility. A typical invoice might show costs for EC2 or EKS instances, but Kubernetes workloads often depend on external resources like databases, storage, and CDNs. Without breaking down costs at the namespace, pod, and service levels, understanding the full scope of application expenses becomes challenging.
Accurate cost observability requires tracking each Kubernetes service alongside external dependencies. Only by dissecting these components can you measure the true cost of application features, transactions, and workloads.
What Happened to KubeCost? A 2025 Update
In September 2024, IBM acquired Kubecost, a leading provider of Kubernetes cost monitoring and optimization software, to enhance its FinOps capabilities.
This acquisition followed IBM's purchase of Apptio in 2023, further strengthening its position in the FinOps market.
While the integration of Kubecost into IBM's FinOps suite aims to provide comprehensive cloud cost management solutions, some industry analysts have noted potential challenges, including integration complexities and the need for seamless alignment with IBM's existing tools and platforms.
Given these developments, it's advisable to carefully evaluate your options when selecting a Kubernetes cost management tool to ensure it aligns with your organization's specific needs and objectives.
5 Kubernetes Cost Management Tools to Consider
As businesses – from fast-growing startups to global enterprises – deploy thousands of container instances daily, the need for better cost observability continues to rise. FinOps plays a crucial role in addressing these challenges by fostering closer collaboration between DevOps, finance, and business teams. While FinOps is primarily a cultural shift, the right tools can significantly enhance your ability to manage and optimize cloud costs.
Here’s a look at some of the leading Kubernetes cost observability tools to help you gain clearer insights and drive more efficient cloud spending:
#1. Finout
Finout’s Kubernetes Cost Management Solution
Finout has quickly emerged as a key player in Kubernetes cost management, purpose-built with FinOps principles at its core. Designed for seamless integration and minimal setup, Finout connects directly to your Prometheus DB via its open-source cronjob or integrates with Datadog through its API. This allows for real-time access to Kubernetes cluster metrics, including CPU and memory consumption, without the need for complex configurations.
Once integrated, Finout delivers granular cost insights across pods, deployments, namespaces, cron jobs, StatefulSets, and entire clusters. These metrics are then mapped to your AWS billing data, providing enriched cost visibility at the finest level. This detailed view addresses a common Kubernetes pain point – accurately allocating cloud costs by customer, tenant, team, or application, all while eliminating blind spots in cloud spending.
Finout’s intuitive platform makes reporting fast and precise, offering a clear breakdown of Kubernetes and AWS resources per business unit. With Finout, it feels as if AWS provides you with itemized, workload-specific invoices – giving you the confidence to manage and optimize costs across complex, multi-layered environments.
Kubernetes-focused Case Studies:
Year founded: 2021, Tel Aviv, Israel
G2 score: 4.6
Best for: Enterprises that need to manage and govern cost forcomplex infrastructures including Kubernetes
Pricing structure: Flat monthly rate starting at $500 per month. A free version is available for companies with a maximum annual cloud spend of $50,000.
#2. Kubernetes Dashboard
Kubernetes Dashboard is an open-source, general-purpose web UI for Kubernetes clusters. As part of the official Kubernetes project, it’s completely free, and configuration and installation are straightforward. With Kubernetes Dashboard, you can check what’s running in your cluster and see its distribution to your worker nodes.
While Kubernetes Dashboard displays key metrics that impact your cloud bill, such as CPU and memory usage, it does not provide any information about cost visibility, such as price per pod or deployment. In addition, you cannot connect the dashboard to any external billing system, such as AWS Billing, for data collection or enrichment.
Year founded: First released in 2014 by Google, now maintained by the CNCF.
G2 score: N/A
Best for: Businesses looking for an easy way to get an overview of the applications running in their Kubernetes clusters and to create or modify individual resources.
Pricing structure: Free and open-source.
#3. Cast.ai
Cast.ai is a cloud cost-optimization tool designed specifically for managing and autoscaling Kubernetes clusters. It provides real-time monitoring, automated savings reports, and built-in security features for monitoring your containers for potential vulnerabilities or misconfiguration issues.
While Cast.ai can help you significantly reduce your cloud bill with automated scaling and cost-reporting, it’s not a FinOps solution, since it only caters to the needs of DevOps teams. It also lacks support for other virtualization platforms, and is limited to Kubernetes deployments only.
Year founded: 2019, North Miami Beach, Florida
G2 score: 5.0
Best for: DevOps teams looking to reduce their workloads and operational costs with an AI-powered, highly automated solution.
Pricing structure: Tier-based pricing structure starting at $200 per month plus $5 per CPU for guaranteed cloud savings across up to 4 clusters. A free version is also available.
#4. ScaleOps
caleOps is a Kubernetes cost optimization platform that delivers real-time visibility and automated resource control. It dynamically adjusts workloads to reduce waste and optimize costs at the pod, deployment, and namespace levels.
ScaleOps integrates directly with AWS Billing and other cloud platforms, eliminating the need for third-party databases. This simplifies cost tracking across Kubernetes and cloud services.
While ScaleOps offers a free tier, advanced features like automated scaling and multi-cloud optimization are part of premium plans. Its cross-cloud support makes it ideal for managing Kubernetes deployments across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Year founded: 2023, San Francisco, California
G2 score: 4.8
Best for: Automatic optimization for Kubernetes
Pricing structure: $5 vCPU/monthly
#5. ContainIQ
ContainIQ is one of the newest Kubernetes-specific monitoring and observability platforms on the market. It provides the four main features that one would expect of such a solution – logs, metrics, events, and latency. It also offers a simple one-line install that gives DevOps teams a fully managed self-service solution that requires little to no maintenance.
ContainIQ automatically generates Kubernetes cost optimization recommendations based on real-time usage metrics, applying them dynamically for instant results. It also breaks down the cost allocation of resources like namespaces, pods, labels, and containers. However, although it’s easy to use, it’s not a FinOps tool and caters largely to DevOps and engineering teams.
Year founded: 2020, Hoboken, New Jersey
G2 score: N/A
Best for: DevOps and engineering teams seeking a unified way to monitor Kubernetes cluster health and drill down into problems to identify root causes.
Pricing structure: $20 per month per node plus $0.50 per GB of log data ingested. Custom plans for enterprises are also available.
Final Words
While Kubernetes offers unmatched scalability and flexibility, managing cloud costs in containerized environments presents unique challenges. Adopting a FinOps approach extends beyond cost tracking – it’s about building a more efficient, sustainable business model that aligns engineering, finance, and operations. For SaaS companies and enterprises alike, this shift is essential to maintaining profitability and growth.
Finout’s Kubernetes cost-monitoring platform provides deeper visibility and control than traditional tools, enabling businesses to stay on top of cloud spending as they scale. With Finout, you can break down costs at every layer, ensuring complete transparency and driving smarter resource allocation.
Gain full cloud cost observability in minutes and take control of your Kubernetes expenses. Book a demo today and take the next step in your FinOps journey.
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