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Kubernetes Cost Monitoring for Indie Hackers & Small Teams
Keep your side project bill predictable with a lightweight, open-source stack.
D
Daniel Paz • 1 min read
You don’t need an enterprise platform to track costs for a small cluster. Keep it scrappy.
- One small on-demand node plus spot buffer; autoscale only when needed.
- Use ClusterCost agent + CLI; no extra DBs. Export a weekly CSV to your email.
- Prune load balancers and PVCs monthly; cap log retention at 7 days.
- Use private endpoints to avoid surprise egress; keep services in one AZ.
- Set a budget alert at $X/month; freeze non-critical namespaces when exceeded.
- Keep one namespace per project with strict ResourceQuota/LimitRange to avoid surprise bursts.
- Schedule nightly scale-downs and weekend shutdowns; most side projects are idle off-hours.
- Use a tiny ingress (shared) and avoid heavy meshes/APM until traffic justifies it.
Simple guardrails beat surprise AWS invoices—especially when it’s your own credit card.***
👨💻
Daniel Paz
Marketing Lead
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