GKE vs EKS Cost Calculator: A 2025 Comparison

Google Cloud (GCP) invented Kubernetes. Does that mean GKE is cheaper than AWS EKS? The answer is nuanced, depending on your scale, your reliance on “Spot” instances, and whether you need regional high availability.

1. The Control Plane: Free Tier vs. Fixed Fee

This is the most cited difference.

• AWS EKS: $0.10/hour (~$73/month) per cluster. No exceptions.
• GKE (Zonal): First cluster is Free. Subsequent clusters are $0.10/hour.
• GKE (Regional): $0.10/hour. No free tier (unless using Autopilot in some configs).

Takeaway: For development, staging, or small production workloads, GKE’s Zonal cluster is an unbeatable deal. It saves $876/year per environment.

2. Compute: Sustained Use vs. Savings Plans

AWS: Savings Plans

AWS requires you to commit.

• You promise to spend $X/hour for 1 or 3 years.
• In return, you get ~30-50% off.
• Risk: If you turn off your servers, you still pay.

GCP: Committed Use Discounts (CUDs)

GCP is similar to AWS Savings Plans now. They have moved away from the automatic “Sustained Use Discounts” for N2/E2 standard families, though some older instance types still benefit.

• CUDs: 1 or 3 year commitment for CPU/RAM.
• Flexibility: GKE works well with these, applying discounts automatically to your aggregate usage.

3. Spot Instances (Preemptible)

Both clouds offer “spare capacity” at steep discounts (60-90%).

• AWS Spot:

  • Pros: Massive capacity pools using ASGs (Auto Scaling Groups) or Karpenter.
  • Cons: Rebalance recommendations give you a 2-minute warning.
  • Management: Requires aws-node-termination-handler.

• GCP Spot VMs:

  • Pros: GKE has native integration. You just set cloud.google.com/gke-spot=true.
  • Cons: Forceful termination can be abrupt.
  • Graceful Shutdown: GKE handles the “SIGTERM” signal propagation very well, making it slightly more user-friendly for beginners.

4. Networking: The Silent Killer

• AWS: You pay for cross-AZ traffic ($0.01/GB). In a HA cluster, pods verify wildly across zones, racking up costs.
• GCP: Also charges for cross-zone traffic, but GKE has “VPC-native” clusters that optimize IP aliasing.

Global Load Balancing: GCP’s Global Load Balancer is a single Anycast IP. AWS requires standard ALBs (Regional) or Global Accelerator (Expensive) to match the functionality.

Verdict: The “Small Cluster” Winner

If you are a startup running < 5 clusters: GKE is cheaper. The free control plane and cheaper e2-standard instances drive the bill down.

If you are an Enterprise: It’s a tie. The compute costs generally converge once you factor in Enterprise Discounts (EDP). The decision should be based on Platform Features (GKE Autopilot is ahead of EKS Fargate) and Developer Experience.

[!NOTE] Sticking with AWS? Optimize your existing spend with our EKS Pricing Calculator and learn where your money is going.