The node tax
Why paying per-node for a managed control plane — on hardware you already own — is backwards, and what we charge for instead.
Call it what it is: a node tax. You bring your own server — you bought it, you rack it, you pay the power bill — and your managed-Kubernetes provider bills you again for the privilege of pointing it at their control plane. Per node. Per vCPU. Per gigabyte of RAM that was never theirs.
It’s such a normal line item that most people stopped questioning it. We didn’t.
Where the cost actually is
Two things are true at the same time, and the pricing of most managed offerings only reflects one of them.
- The control plane is hard to run, and roughly fixed in cost. etcd, certificates, upgrades, availability — skilled work, but it doesn’t scale linearly with how many nodes you attach. A control plane managing 5 nodes and one managing 50 are not ten times apart in operational effort.
- The nodes are easy to run, and already yours. They’re commodity compute. You’re paying their real cost directly — to Hetzner, to AWS, to your electricity provider.
A per-node price bills you on axis 2 — the part the provider doesn’t own and barely touches. That’s the tax.
What it looks like on the invoice
The same cluster, priced three ways:
| Pricing model | What you’re billed for | Who owns the nodes |
|---|---|---|
| Per-node managed | Control plane + every node | You do |
| ”Free” control plane | Nodes, marked up, on the provider’s cloud | The provider |
| Flat control plane | The control plane, full stop | You do |
The middle row is the sneaky one. The control plane is “free” — but you can only attach nodes you rent from them, at their margin. The lock-in is the price.
What we charge for
A flat monthly price for the control plane, and nothing for the nodes. That’s the whole model.
- Bring nodes from anywhere — homelab, Hetzner, AWS, a Pi in the closet.
kubectlagainst a plain, conformant kubeconfig.- Walk away with your hardware whenever you like. It was always yours.
If we ever can’t justify our price by the value of the span — the control plane we actually run — then we haven’t earned it. Taxing your piers isn’t the answer.
Prices on the site are placeholders during early access, and we’ll say so plainly until they’re not. But the shape of the pricing won’t change: you pay for the hard part we run, and never for the hardware you already own.