EKS vs AKS vs GKE Pricing (2026)
For 3 worker nodes with 4 vCPU and 8 GB RAM (incl. 1 TB egress), the cheapest of the three US hyperscalers is Azure AKS at €371.75 per month. The same cluster on Infomaniak, the cheapest European managed Kubernetes (EU or Swiss provider), costs €50.52 (86% less).
Prices updated . List prices excl. VAT, on-demand, EU regions.
The three hyperscalers
| Service | Control plane/mo | Worker node | 3-node cluster/mo | Egress/GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS EKS | €63.70 | t4g.xlarge (4 vCPU / 16 GB) | €456.67 | €0.079 |
| Azure AKS | Free tier | B4pls_v2 (4 vCPU / 8 GB) | €371.75 | €0.080 |
| Google GKE | €62.84 | e2-standard-4 (4 vCPU / 16 GB) | €484.03 | €0.103 |
AKS: the free tier has no financially backed uptime SLA; the Standard tier with SLA is billed per cluster-hour (see Azure's pricing page). Egress is tiered on all three; the figure shown is the first tier.
The same cluster on European providers (EU/CH)
| Provider | Worker node | 3-node cluster/mo | vs Azure AKS |
|---|---|---|---|
 Infomaniak | a4-ram8-disk80-perf1 (4 vCPU / 8 GB) | €50.52 | -86% |
 Gcore | g0-standard-4-8 (4 vCPU / 8 GB) | €97.92 | -74% |
 Scaleway | DEV1-L (4 vCPU / 8 GB) | €113.01 | -70% |
 Serverspace | vStack 4vCPU 8GB (4 vCPU / 8 GB) | €135.07 | -64% |
| Cyso | Standard Medium (4 vCPU / 16 GB) | €142.49 | -62% |
 UpCloud | Premium 4xCPU-8GB (4 vCPU / 8 GB) | €156.00 | -58% |
What the list price leaves out
Hyperscaler bills grow with egress, load balancer data processing and NAT gateways, none of which show up in the node price. Most EU providers include several TB of traffic per server or don't meter it at all.
The other side: managed node groups, IAM integration and the surrounding services are where EKS, AKS and GKE earn their premium. If you depend on them, the comparison is about migration effort, not node prices. For data residency, see the compliance matrix.
How we compare
Same model as the Kubernetes calculator: 3 worker nodes, cheapest plan with ≥ 4 vCPU and ≥ 8 GB RAM, 80 GB storage per node, 1 TB egress, control-plane fee where charged. Data from our open pricing dataset.