What Kubernetes really costs in Switzerland

A production Kubernetes cluster with three worker nodes of 4 vCPU and 16 GB RAM each, 500 GB of storage and a control plane with an SLA costs between CHF 158 and CHF 779 a month at Swiss providers. That is the smaller half of the bill. Operations start at CHF 1,730 a month, calculated at four hours a week at the lowest Swiss hourly rate.

Both figures are a model calculation. Every input comes from a public price list, retrieved on 19 August 2026. For context we worked the same scenario through on Azure in Switzerland North and on AWS in Europe (Zurich). The derivation is below, item by item.

Why searching for Kubernetes prices in Switzerland comes up empty

Search for Kubernetes costs and you find calculators from AWS, Azure and Google in USD and EUR. For Swiss providers there is not a single worked comparison in CHF. That is the reason for this article.

Instead, two figures circulate that both come from search summaries rather than from checked price lists: “managed Kubernetes from CHF 100 a month” and “CHF 150 to 400 a month”. We looked both up. Both are wrong, in different directions.

The cheapest published entry point is considerably lower. At Infomaniak the shared control plane is free, and three worker nodes with 2 vCPU and 4 GB RAM cost CHF 0.01043 per hour per node, so around CHF 23 a month together. With a load balancer, a minimal cluster lands at roughly CHF 33.

And a cluster at production size is considerably higher than CHF 400. At Flow Swiss a single worker node with 4 vCPU and 16 GB RAM alone costs CHF 197 a month. Three of them are mandatory.

The four cost blocks the bill is made of

A Kubernetes bill consists of control plane, worker nodes, storage plus traffic, and operations. The first three are on the price list. The fourth is nowhere and is the largest.

First, because it is the second most common search in this area: Kubernetes is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence and therefore free of licence cost. Operating it is not. You do not pay a licence, you pay for machines and people.

Control plane. The price for the managed control plane. Exoscale and Infomaniak give it away in the basic variant, though then without an SLA. At Flow Swiss it costs CHF 73 a month per cluster, independent of cluster size.

Worker nodes. The largest item on the bill. Between Swiss providers the differences here are factors, not percentages.

Storage and traffic. Block storage is billed per GiB-hour. Egress models differ sharply: Infomaniak gives bandwidth away free as a matter of course, Flow Swiss includes 20 TB per organisation per month, and Exoscale grants 1.42 GiB per hour per instance and charges CHF 0.02 per GiB after that.

Operations. Upgrades, certificates, network policies, alerts at three in the morning. This block appears on no price list, because no provider sells it.

This is exactly where budgets slip. A managed Kubernetes offering from Infomaniak or Exoscale takes on the control plane, the etcd backups and node provisioning. Everything above the Kubernetes API stays with you: ingress, certificate rotation, RBAC, backups of application data, alerting, and the question of who plans the upgrade path.

What managed Kubernetes costs: the Swiss provider comparison

Of seven Swiss providers, four publish a price list and three do not. All values in the table below come from the linked price lists, retrieved 19 August 2026, excluding VAT.

Three notes. First, Flow Swiss computes monthly prices with 730 hours and Exoscale with 720; we standardise on 730 below. Second, AWS publishes only USD for the Zurich region, while Azure delivers genuine CHF prices for Switzerland North through the retail prices API. We convert nothing, because we have no defensible reference rate for a given day.

Third, Exoscale has belonged to A1 Digital, a subsidiary of the Telekom Austria Group, since 2017. The data sits in Switzerland; the ownership does not. For revDSG questions both count.

The model calculation: the same cluster at five providers

The same reference scenario costs between CHF 158.10 at Infomaniak and CHF 779.00 at Flow Swiss. The scenario: three worker nodes of 4 vCPU and 16 GB RAM each, 500 GB of persistent storage, a control plane with an SLA, one load balancer, egress under 1 TB, calculated at 730 hours.

A model calculation, not a quotation. Prices excluding VAT, retrieved 19 August 2026 from the price lists linked above. The storage row additionally contains the node disks at Exoscale (3 × 50 GiB), which are billed separately there; at Infomaniak 50 GB per node is included in the flavour; at Azure it corresponds to a premium SSD P20 with 512 GiB. Egress falls within the free allowance or is free at all five.

Price is not performance. Infomaniak runs shared vCPUs in an OpenStack cluster and positions itself explicitly on price. Flow Swiss delivers dedicated resources, a 99.9 per cent SLA and two Swiss regions. What the table does not capture: support quality, response time during incidents, API maturity, how quickly a new Kubernetes minor version becomes available.

What Kubernetes costs on Azure and AWS in Switzerland

Azure AKS in Switzerland North costs CHF 601.74 a month in the same scenario, AWS EKS in Europe (Zurich) USD 705.85. Both therefore sit within the field of Swiss providers rather than above it. That refutes the widespread assumption that a hyperscaler is automatically the expensive option.

Azure is cheaper than Flow Swiss and dearer than Exoscale. Infomaniak undercuts Azure by nearly a factor of four. The price spread within Switzerland is therefore larger than the gap between Switzerland and the hyperscalers.

Two differences that appear on no price list. First, egress: Azure gives 100 GB a month free and charges CHF 0.0656 per GB after that, AWS USD 0.09 per GB up to 10 TB. At Infomaniak bandwidth is free; at Flow Swiss 20 TB is included. Shipping 2 TB (2,000 GB) a month costs an additional CHF 124.64 at Azure and nothing at Infomaniak.

Second, the legal position. Microsoft and AWS operate Swiss regions but as US groups are subject to the CLOUD Act. For revDSG reviews with elevated protection needs, that is the point where the pricing question ends and the architecture question begins.

What operations cost: Swiss hourly rates as the unit

Operations cost a multiple of the infrastructure. gryps.ch gives, for software engineering in German-speaking Switzerland, CHF 100 to 150 an hour for junior profiles and CHF 140 to 180 for senior profiles, with CHF 160 as the midpoint in the published example (retrieved 19 August 2026). Running a cluster is senior work.

The row that matters: even the most cautious assumption, four hours a week at the lowest published rate, comes to CHF 1,730 a month. That is more than the most expensive infrastructure bill in the comparison above.

Four hours a week is tight for a production cluster. Kubernetes ships three minor versions a year, each with deprecations. How much preparation a single upgrade costs we worked through on the example of 1.37.

Work your own case through completely once, infrastructure plus person-days. We do that with you in one session, with your node sizes and your price list, and you keep the table. Thirty minutes with an engineer who runs Swiss clusters.

Managed, self-operated, or operated for you

There are three operating models, and they differ less in price than in who gets up at night. The matrix below sorts them along the criteria that actually come up in budget discussions.

The price for “operated for you” is public: VSHN publishes CHF 4,900 a month as the baseline for managed OpenShift on cloud provider infrastructure, CHF 7,500 with 99.9 per cent around the clock, and CHF 10,100 at 99.99 per cent (retrieved 19 August 2026). The hourly rate for additional work is CHF 250.

This is where the gap in the Swiss market sits. Exoscale, Infomaniak, Flow Swiss, cloudscale.ch, Metanet and Swisscom sell infrastructure. VSHN sells its own platform. Nobody sells “we build and operate your platform on your infrastructure, with your tools”. That is precisely our position, which is why it appears here in the matrix rather than in an advertising box.

Where the over-provisioning nobody sees is hiding

The infrastructure bill is created at a point that lives in the code, not in the portal. Kubernetes schedules pods by requests, not by actual load. Requesting generously means paying for nodes worth of capacity that is never used.

resources:
  requests:
    cpu: "2"
    memory: "4Gi"
  limits:
    cpu: "2"
    memory: "4Gi"

Four such pods occupy 8 vCPU and thereby tie up, on the CPU side, two of the worker nodes from our reference scenario. At Flow Swiss that is CHF 394 a month, at Infomaniak CHF 50.06. Whether the pods use 5 per cent or 95 per cent of it is not visible on the bill.

Comparing requested against consumed takes two commands:

kubectl get pods -A -o custom-columns=\
NS:.metadata.namespace,\
POD:.metadata.name,\
CPU_REQ:.spec.containers[*].resources.requests.cpu,\
MEM_REQ:.spec.containers[*].resources.requests.memory

kubectl top pods -A --containers

Wherever the second output sits durably far below the first, you are paying for air. That is the only lever in this article that works without changing provider.

When the cluster does not pay for itself

Below roughly five services and one team, Kubernetes does not pay for itself in Switzerland. At CHF 158 of infrastructure and CHF 2,430 of operations a month, around 94 per cent of the bill goes on operational knowledge that a single well-sized VM with Docker Compose, systemd and a clean deploy script does not need.

We advise against it in those cases, even though we build and run Kubernetes. The honest question is in Kubernetes is not a goal: what happens when this service falls over at three in the morning, and who looks at it? If the answer is “an alert, a runbook, a restart”, you do not need an orchestrator.

The cluster pays for itself as soon as several teams deploy independently, load spikes are unpredictable, or compliance demands reproducible, declarative infrastructure with an audit trail. For onocoy and Relai exactly that applies. For an application with one database and known traffic it does not.

What changes on the bill over twelve months

Over twelve months it is mostly the worker nodes that move, and in both directions. Right-sizing the requests typically extracts the most, because it directly reduces the number of nodes.

Cluster autoscaling only helps with variable load. With constant baseline load it does not move the bill, it complicates it. Infomaniak and Exoscale support node pools with a minimum and a maximum; setting both to the same value gives you autoscaling in name only.

What is missing in Switzerland: reservations. Neither Exoscale nor Infomaniak nor Flow Swiss publishes discounts for term commitments of the kind AWS offers with savings plans. Planning to save 30 per cent through prepayment means planning with an instrument that does not exist here.

The operations side moves the other way. Effort is highest in the first year, because ingress, secrets handling, backup strategy and CI integration are only being built. After that it settles to a background hum of upgrades and incidents, and that background hum is the number to plan with, not the build-out effort.

The item that blows this calculation apart fastest is not in it: GPUs. A single inference card costs more than the entire cluster above. What sovereign AI inference costs on Swiss infrastructure, and from what request volume self-operation beats an API, is in sovereign AI inference in Switzerland.

Frequently asked

What does a managed Kubernetes cluster cost per month in Switzerland?

A cluster with three worker nodes of 4 vCPU and 16 GB RAM each, 500 GB of storage and a control plane with an SLA costs between CHF 158 and CHF 779 a month, depending on the provider. The minimum for a very small cluster at Infomaniak is around CHF 33. All values from published price lists, retrieved 19 August 2026, excluding VAT.

Isn’t Kubernetes free?

Kubernetes is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence, and there are no licence costs. Costs arise from machines and people: control plane, worker nodes, storage and traffic come to CHF 158 to 779 a month for a cluster at production size, plus operational effort from CHF 1,730 a month. The licence-free part is the smallest part of the bill.

What does Kubernetes cost on Azure and AWS in Switzerland?

Azure AKS in the Switzerland North region costs CHF 601.74 a month in the reference scenario, AWS EKS in Europe (Zurich) USD 705.85. Both sit within the field of Swiss providers: dearer than Exoscale at CHF 540.74, cheaper than Flow Swiss at CHF 779.00. AWS publishes only USD prices for Zurich; Azure delivers genuine CHF prices (as of 19 August 2026).

As an SME do I need Kubernetes at all, or is Docker Compose enough?

Docker Compose on a VM is enough as long as there is one application, one database and one team, and traffic is known. Kubernetes earns its keep from several independently deploying teams, unpredictable load spikes, or compliance requirements for declarative infrastructure. Operating costs from CHF 1,730 a month upward decide this question more often than the infrastructure costs do.

Does my data stay in Switzerland with a Swiss Kubernetes provider?

That depends on the provider and the zone chosen. Infomaniak operates its own data centres in Switzerland, Flow Swiss the regions ZRH1 and ALP1. Exoscale offers the Swiss zones ch-gva-2 and ch-dk-2, but has belonged to the Telekom Austria Group since 2017. For revDSG reviews, ownership matters alongside location.

Let’s work through your cluster

Bring your node sizes, your storage class, and an honest estimate of the internal hours. We put the current price lists next to them and work both sides of the bill, infrastructure and operations, through in one session.

Book a slot or write to us if you would rather ask by email. What we build and operate in this area is under Kubernetes and infrastructure.