ReferenceBilling
Billing
How Kubeadapt charges and what counts toward your bill. Per-vCPU pricing, and the first 100 vCPU are always free.
How pricing works
Kubeadapt is priced per vCPU, per month, against the workload requests in your cluster. Standard pricing is tiered against billable vCPU and drops as you scale. There are no per-feature, per-cluster or per-seat charges. Every plan includes every feature.
Standard
From $1.99
/ vCPU / month · tiered
Startups
No tiers$0.60
/ vCPU / month · flat
Always free
0
first 100 vCPU
Standard tier schedule
- Billable 0–500$1.99
- Billable 500–2,000$1.49
- Billable 2,000–5,000$0.99
- Billable 5,000+$0.60
Each tier prices only the slice of billable vCPU inside it, the same way income tax brackets work.
We bill on requested vCPU rather than limits or actual usage because requests are what your scheduler reserves. Spot, on-demand, Reserved Instance and Savings Plan nodes all bill at the same per-vCPU rate. The Kubeadapt rate does not depend on your cloud bill.
What counts as billable vCPU
We sample the requested vCPU on every running pod once per minute and average it over the billing month. Your bill uses that monthly average, minus the free allowance.
What counts
- CPU requests of every container in a running pod.
- All workload kinds: Deployments, StatefulSets, DaemonSets, Jobs, CronJobs and bare pods.
What doesn’t
- CPU limits. Only requests count.
- Actual usage. An idle workload still counts if it requests vCPU.
- System namespaces:
kube-systemandkubeadapt, which includes the agent itself. - Pending or failed pods. Only running pods count.
- Memory and storage. Billing is vCPU only.
Worked example
A cluster averages 240 vCPU of requests across the month. The first 100 are free, and the remaining 140 sit in tier 1 (0–500 billable) at $1.99 / vCPU.
(240 − 100) × $1.99 = $278.60 / month
A startup with the same 240 vCPU pays $84.00 / month on the flat $0.60 rate.
A larger cluster at 6,100 vCPU (6,000 billable) walks through all four tiers: $6,800 / month on Standard, $3,600 / month on Startups.
The 100 vCPU free allowance
Every Kubeadapt account gets 100 vCPU free, with the full feature set: the same Cost Monitoring, Rightsizing, Best Practices, CLI and API as paid plans.
- The allowance is account-wide, not per cluster. Five clusters at 20 vCPU each (100 total) pay nothing.
- A cluster at 105 vCPU pays for the 5 above the allowance: 5 × $1.99 = $9.95 / month at tier 1 of the Standard rate.
- Brief spikes are averaged. Two hours at 130 vCPU, then back to 90, bills only the extra 30 vCPU for those two hours, at the tier rate that slice falls in.
- No credit card is needed to start.
Plans
Every plan has the same features. The plan only changes the per-vCPU rate and the contract terms.
Standard
Tiered: $1.99 → $0.60
Best for Most accounts
- Sign up yourself at app.kubeadapt.io
- Support by email
- Every feature included
Startups
$0.60 / vCPU / month
Best for < 3 yrs · < 30 staff · < $6M raised
- Flat rate, no tiers
- Self-attested, confirmed once a year
- Same support and features as Standard
Enterprise
Custom
Best for 5,000+ vCPU
- Contract pricing and invoicing terms
- Rate locked for the contract length
- Talk to sales@kubeadapt.io
If you outgrow startup eligibility (you raise more than $6M, hire your 30th employee, or pass your third birthday), you move to Standard at the start of the next billing month, never mid-month.
Invoices and payment
Billing is handled by our team by email; there is no self-serve billing screen yet. Settings → Billing in the dashboard shows your current usage: clusters, average vCPU over the last 30 days, members and data retention.
- Invoices are sent by email to your billing contact.
- For payment methods, a PO number on the invoice, VAT details or a different billing contact, email billing@kubeadapt.io.
- For annual or multi-year terms, email sales@kubeadapt.io.
Cancellation and your data
To cancel, email billing@kubeadapt.io from an organization admin address. Billing stops at the end of the current month.
- To have your organization’s data deleted, ask in the same email.
- Cancelling does not stop the agent. Follow the uninstall steps to remove the Helm release from your cluster.
Common questions
Do I get charged twice if a pod is rescheduled?
No. We bill on average requested vCPU per minute. A pod rescheduled from one node to another in the same minute counts once.
Are spot or preemptible nodes billed differently?
No. Kubeadapt billing depends on pod requests, not node type. A 100m request bills the same on a spot node as on an on-demand node.
Can I get a PO number or custom reference on the invoice?
Yes. Email the PO number, billing email and any reference fields to billing@kubeadapt.io.
Billing questions
Email us about invoices, contracts or an estimate.
For an invoice question, a custom contract or a worked estimate for your environment, send us the details.