EKS pricing calculator: monthly cost estimate
Estimate what an EKS cluster costs each month: the control plane, the EC2 worker nodes, and optional NAT gateways and load balancers. Change any input or price and the total updates in your browser.
By Muhammad Soliman, Founder at SeaGit
Extended support costs $0.60 per cluster-hour, against $0.10 for standard. Choose extended only for a version past its standard end date.
Number of EC2 instances that stay running.
730 is an average month running 24 hours a day. Lower it for nodes that are stopped part of the time.
One per Availability Zone is common. Use 0 with public subnets.
Traffic from private subnets to the internet, not to AWS services that have endpoints.
Hourly charge only. LCU usage is not included.
Override prices (snapshot 2026-10-10, US East (N. Virginia), us-east-1)
Estimated per month
$320.59
| Item | How it is calculated | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| EKS control plane (standard support) | 1 cluster × $0.10/hr × 730 hr | $73.00 |
| Worker nodes (EC2, on-demand) | 3 × m5.large at $0.0960/hr × 730 hr | $210.24 |
| NAT gateway hourly charge | 1 × $0.045/hr × 730 hr | $32.85 |
| NAT gateway data processed | 100 GB × $0.045/GB | $4.50 |
| Total | $320.59 | |
Prices as of 2026-10-10, US East (N. Virginia), us-east-1, Linux, on-demand. Not included: EBS volumes, public IPv4 addresses, cross-AZ and internet data transfer, load balancer LCUs, logs, and Savings Plans or Reserved Instance discounts. Verify on aws.amazon.com before you budget.
What drives the cost
An EKS bill has three parts that you can estimate in advance. The control plane is a flat hourly fee for each cluster, so it grows with the number of clusters, not with their size. Worker nodes are ordinary EC2 instances, so they make up most of the bill for a typical cluster, and their cost is the instance price times the count times the hours they run. The rest are the network items: a NAT gateway charges an hourly fee and again for every gigabyte it processes, and an Application Load Balancer charges an hourly fee on top of its usage.
Two choices move the total more than most people expect. The first is the Kubernetes version. A version past its standard support end date moves to extended support, which raises the control plane rate from $0.10 to $0.60 per cluster-hour. The second is the NAT gateway. One per Availability Zone in a private subnet is a common setup, and the per-gigabyte charge grows with traffic that leaves the VPC.
How to use the estimate
Start with the number of clusters and nodes you expect to run most of the month, then set the hours. The default of 730 is an average month running all day. For a development cluster that is shut down at night, lower the hours to match. Next, choose the instance type, and set the NAT and load balancer counts to match the network design.
The price overrides panel holds the snapshot prices. Use it to try a discounted node rate, a different region's rate that you have looked up, or a newer price after AWS changes one. Reset restores the snapshot.
The estimate is a planning figure. It is a sum of hourly charges for the items shown, not a quote. For a full estimate, enter the same resources in the AWS Pricing Calculator.
How SeaGit handles this
SeaGit deploys EKS clusters into your own AWS account. The clusters and workloads are provisioned there, so AWS bills the infrastructure to you directly. SeaGit's comparison copy describes this as no infrastructure markup. The bring-your-own-cloud page covers the account model in more detail.
The estimate covers AWS charges only. Any SeaGit plan fee is separate and is described on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
How much does an EKS cluster cost per month before any nodes?
- At standard support the control plane is $0.10 per cluster per hour. Over an average month of 730 hours that is about $73. Extended support is $0.60 per cluster per hour, about $438 a month for the same cluster. The price is the same for each cluster, whatever its size.
Why is my estimate much lower than my AWS bill?
- The estimate covers the main hourly items. It leaves out EBS volumes, public IPv4 addresses, data transfer between Availability Zones and to the internet, load balancer LCU charges, CloudWatch logs and any discounts or credits. Add those lines from the AWS Pricing Calculator before you budget.
Are the prices current?
- The prices are a snapshot taken on 2026-10-10 for US East (N. Virginia), Linux, on-demand. AWS changes prices and adds instance types. Check the EKS, EC2, VPC and Elastic Load Balancing pricing pages, or the AWS Pricing Calculator, before you rely on a number. You can replace any price in the overrides panel.
Do Savings Plans or Reserved Instances change this?
- Yes. The calculator uses on-demand rates. A Savings Plan or Reserved Instance lowers the node rate, and you can enter the discounted hourly rate in the node price override to see the effect. Control plane pricing is not discounted by those plans.
Does SeaGit add a markup on the AWS bill?
- SeaGit provisions clusters into your own AWS account, so AWS bills you directly for the infrastructure. The comparison copy on seagit.com describes this as no infrastructure markup. The estimate on this page does not include any SeaGit plan fee; see the pricing page for those.
Sources
Checked prices snapshot 2026-10-10.
- Amazon EKS pricing — standard and extended Kubernetes version support per cluster per hour
- Amazon EC2 On-Demand pricing — instance hourly rates, Linux, shared tenancy
- Amazon VPC pricing (NAT gateways) — NAT gateway hourly and per-GB data processing charges
- Elastic Load Balancing pricing — Application Load Balancer hourly charge, before LCU usage