Forget EKS — A Few Hetzner Boxes Replaced Our $800/Month Bill

Our Kubernetes bill on AWS was $800 a month for a workload that now runs on 3 Hetzner servers.

Same services.

Same manifests, almost line for line.

The new bill is $354 a month, and nobody outside the team noticed the move happened.

I am not here to tell you Kubernetes is a mistake. I am here to tell you what we were actually paying for.

Where The $800 Actually Went

Before a single pod runs, the EKS control plane costs $0.10 an hour, which is about $73 a month per cluster.

Then come the worker nodes, the load balancer, the NAT gateway, the disks, and the traffic leaving AWS.

Here is the same capacity on both sides — 16 vCPU and 64 GB of RAM for workloads — at current 2026 on-demand list prices:

Line item       | EKS (AWS) | k3s (Hetzner)
--------------- | --------- | -------------
Control plane   | $73       | $10
Compute         | $561      | $326
Load balancer   | $22       | $8
NAT gateway     | $46       | $0
Public IPv4     | $11       | $2
Disks           | $24       | $8
Egress traffic  | $45       | $0
Logs and misc   | $18       | $0
…