Kubecost

IBM Kubecost is a Kubernetes cost monitoring and optimization solution from IBM Apptio, designed to help engineering, platform, FinOps, and finance teams understand and manage the cost of running Kubernetes. Building on its open-source roots, it provides real-time visibility into spending across clusters, teams, namespaces, workloads, and shared resources, including multi-cloud, hybrid, and on-premises environments. Teams can reconcile Kubernetes costs with cloud provider bills, identify over-provisioned workloads, and act on savings opportunities through automated request sizing and namespace turndown.

Budgeting, forecasting, anomaly detection, alerts, and role-based reporting help organizations improve accountability and prevent unexpected spend without sacrificing performance. Kubecost offers a free Foundations deployment for smaller teams, with unlimited clusters up to 250 cores, 15-day metric retention, optimization insights, and community support. Its self-hosted Enterprise option adds a unified multi-cluster view, unlimited clusters at any scale, and unlimited metric retention for larger deployments.

IBM says installation can take under five minutes, enabling teams to start tracking Kubernetes costs quickly and scale with greater financial clarity