Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Kubernetes on AWS with Kops For Less Than $1/day
AWS Kubernetes is expensive to run by default. This entire blog is running on AWS Kubernetes via kops for just $1/day. Read the step-by-step instructions.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier. Kubernetes on AWS with Kops For Less Than $1/day launched in 2020; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1
Hello HN! I've been working on Canine for about a year now. It started when I was sick of paying the overhead of using stuff like Heroku, Render, Fly, etc to host some web apps that I've built. At one point I was paying over $400 a month for hosting these in the cloud. Last year I moved all my stuff to Hetzner. For a 4GB machine, the cost of various providers: Heroku = $260 Fly.io = $65 Render = $85 Hetzner = $4 (This problem gets a lot worse when you need > 4GB) The only downside of using Hetzner is that there isn’t a super straightforward way to do stuff like: - DNS management / SSL…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Hi HN, I’ve been working with Kubernetes for over a decade, since the alpha days, and was involved in kube-aws project before AWS launched EKS. For the past four years, I’ve been helping friends and small businesses cut costs by running Kubernetes on Hetzner Cloud, which I’ve found to be rock solid and by far the best priced provider. Provisioning a cluster on Hetzner is now straightforward, thanks to tools like k3s and hetzner-k3s, but configuring it for your specific needs still takes time and expertise. I built Edka to make that part easy: spin up a production ready cluster in ~2 minutes,…
2025 · edka.io · its alternatives →
- 3
Since there’s a few discussions recently on $4 VPSes we thought you might be interested in Symbiosis, a cheaper and simpler managed k8s provider. Supported features include external LBs, encrypted+replicated storage and autoscaler. Infrastructure can be managed with UI, CLI, Terraform or Pulumi. Control planes are free of charge and a 1vCPU/2GB node goes for $6 per month. We’re live in Germany right now and we’re expanding into US during 2023. Feel free to try it out and leave a comment.
2023 · symbiosis.host · its alternatives →
- 4
- 5
RunsOnfree tier, from $300/mo▲14210x cheaper GitHub Actions runners, self-hosted on AWS
2024 · runs-on.com · its alternatives →
- 6
WarpBuildfree tier, from $0.003/mo▲19510x cheaper Github actions in your AWS account
2024 · warpbuild.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Monitor compute, GPU, storage, and network costs allocated by namespace, deployment, or label. Identify pod waste and rightsize workloads.
2021 · vantage.sh · its alternatives →
- 8
100% free K8s courses to make you a Kubernetes pro
2022 · infracloud.io · its alternatives →
- 9
Amazon EKS▲10Highly available and scalable Kubernetes service
2017 · aws.amazon.com · its alternatives →
- 10
Easily host Express.js apps on AWS serverless infrastructure
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
- 12AO
2017 · play-with-k8s.com · its alternatives →
- 13U2
Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We launched on Hacker News for the first time early last year, and we've made a lot of progress since then. We've saved tens of millions of dollars for companies, and we are even more excited to announce the launch of a new product: insured reservations for RDS! We worked closely with AWS on this feature and are excited to finally make it generally available. We help companies drive down AWS EC2 & RDS spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time managing costs…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 14
- 15AM
Hey all - I work at Vantage, a FinOps platform. I know AI is peak hype right now. But it has definitely changed some of our dev workflows already. So we wanted to find a way to let our customers experiment with how they can use AI to make their cloud cost management work more productive. The MCP Server acts as a connector between LLMs (right now only Claude, Cursor support it but ChatGPT and Google Gemini coming soon) and your cost and usage data on Vantage which supports 20+ cloud infra providers including AWS, Datadog, Mongo, etc. (You have to have a Vantage account to use it since it's…
2025 · its alternatives →
- 16
Open-source cloud-environment inspector. Supporting AWS, GCP, Azure, and more! Your cloud resources will have nowhere to hide! - mlabouardy/komiser
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Visualith▲119Simple way to deploy your apps on AWS saving around 60%
2023 · visualith.com · its alternatives →
- 18
Cost monitoring for Kubernetes workloads and cloud costs - opencost/opencost
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
crunr ▲106Launch and run any compute job on AWS with 1 command
May 2026 · crunr.com · its alternatives →
- 20IB
Hey HN: I'm Kaveh, the founder of Usage (https://www.usage.ai/) We help companies drive down AWS costs. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. Stakeholders, especially engineers, are required to spend unnecessary time manually finding underutilized or overly expensive EC2s. We believe the optimization process should be done automatically through a series of sophisticated algorithms. At the moment, there are over 70,000 AWS EC2 prices - doing that manually just won't scale at most organizations. My background is in software engineering. Previous to founding Usage, I…
2020 · its alternatives →
- 21
CloudAvocado▲131Cost optimization insights for Amazon Cloud
2022 · cloudavocado.com · its alternatives →
- 22
Kubernetes cost optimization - catch expensive resource changes before they merge - WozzHQ/wozz
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
- 24KK
KubeDB simplifies Provisioning, Upgrading, Scaling, Volume Expansion, Monitor, Backup, Restore for various Databases in Kubernetes on any Public & Private Cloud
2018 · kubedb.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →