AKS tiers and what they cost
Microsoft sets the control plane price by tier. Free costs nothing beyond the underlying resources, has no SLA, and Microsoft does not recommend it above 10 nodes. Standard costs $73 per cluster per month, or $0.10 per hour, with a financially backed uptime SLA. Premium adds long-term support for $438 per month, or $0.60 per hour.
AKS Automatic charges $116.80 per cluster per month for its hosted components, then adds an amount per vCPU on top of the VMs. In France Central, Azure retail prices list $0.009801 per general purpose vCPU-hour. A development cluster on Standard pays $73 per month for an SLA it may not need. A production cluster on Free runs with no SLA. Review this choice cluster by cluster.
What Onicost shows for the control plane
Onicost applies the Standard fee of $0.10 per hour to every AKS cluster. It does not read the tier of the cluster. A Free cluster therefore shows about $73 too much per month. A Premium cluster shows about $365 less than the real fee. An Automatic cluster shows about $43.80 less, and its amount per vCPU stays apart. Keep this line in mind when you read a cluster total.
Connect the Azure subscription to read the real charges in the Cloud space, by service. You need an Entra admin for consent and the right to assign roles. Commitments take two more roles at tenant level: Reservations Reader and Savings plan reader.
VM pools and Spot pools
Azure bills nodes as virtual machines, by the second. Onicost groups them by AKS node pool and tests in simulation whether the pods fit on fewer VMs or smaller ones. These gains stay estimates.
Spot can cut compute sharply. In France Central, a Standard_D4s_v5 lists $0.224 per hour on demand and $0.041395 on Spot, about 82% less on November 6, 2026. That price varies by region and size. A Spot pool follows rules of its own on AKS. It cannot be the default pool, only a secondary one. It has no SLA, and Azure evicts its nodes when it needs the capacity back.
This pool carries the taint kubernetes.azure.com/scalesetpriority=spot with the NoSchedule effect, so your pods need a toleration and an affinity. Onicost reads the label of the pool and the Spot prices Azure publishes. Its Move to spot recommendation targets eligible Deployments and recalls that no eviction rate is known.
Virtual nodes: a small pod pays for a whole vCPU
Virtual nodes run pods on Azure Container Instances. Microsoft rounds the vCPU request up to a whole number and memory up to the next tenth of a GB, with a minimum of 1 vCPU and 1 GB. In France Central, retail prices list $0.0486 per vCPU-hour and $0.0053 per GB-hour. A pod that requests 250m of CPU and 512 MiB therefore pays for 1 vCPU and 1 GB, about $39.35 per 730-hour month. This amount is our calculation from list prices.
Onicost recognises these nodes and prices each pod with these rounding rules. A workload that can drop one step appears under Oversized serverless pods, with the gap priced at Container Instances rates. Your Onicost subscription counts these pods at their billed vCPUs: a virtual node can declare 10,000 cores, and that capacity does not count.
Some readings are missing. A virtual node does not serve cAdvisor metrics, so CPU throttling, OOM kills, network and ephemeral storage stay unknown for its pods. Microsoft also states that DaemonSets do not deploy there and that persistent volumes are not supported.
Stop idle pools, cover steady spend
A development pool can stop at night. With Team, the scheduler brings a pool down to zero nodes, then gives it back its size, minimum and maximum. On AKS, a system pool keeps one node, and the journal says so. This action goes through a dedicated write identity that you create.
For steady compute, Azure offers reservations and a savings plan over one or three years. The Cloud space lists the ones you hold and proposes commitments sized on regular spend. Kubernetes costs and pool savings stay at public prices, less your global discount.
Start with one production and one development cluster
Install the agent with the Helm command Onicost gives you. Then compare the tier, the pools and the virtual nodes of your two clusters. The Free plan accepts one cluster up to 32 cores. Team, from €39 per month before tax, can be tried for 14 days without a card and brings the Cloud space and the scheduler named above. These amounts stay estimates without network traffic, and they carry no guarantee of savings.
Frequently asked questions
Does Onicost know the tier of my AKS cluster?
No. It applies the Standard fee to every AKS cluster. Once the subscription is connected, the Cloud space shows what Azure really billed.
Are virtual nodes cheaper than VMs?
That depends on pod size and running hours. A small pod pays for at least 1 vCPU and 1 GB. Compare the billed size in the Serverless table with the cost of the same workload on VMs.
Does Onicost cover AKS Automatic?
Onicost prices the VMs of an Automatic cluster at public prices. It leaves aside the Automatic amount per vCPU and uses the Standard fee, so its estimate stays below the bill.