FinOps

Tools

Comparison

Updated Feb 2026

Infracost vs Kubecost vs Cloudability: FinOps Tool Comparison

Q: Can I use Infracost, Kubecost, and Cloudability together?

Yes — and many mature FinOps organizations do exactly that. These tools are complementary rather than competing: Infracost handles pre-deployment IaC cost estimation in CI/CD, Kubecost provides runtime Kubernetes cost allocation, and Cloudability delivers enterprise-wide multi-cloud governance. Using all three gives you shift-left estimation, runtime container visibility, and executive-level reporting in a single stack.

Q: Which tool is best for Kubernetes cost optimization?

Kubecost is the clear leader for Kubernetes-specific cost optimization. It provides namespace-level, pod-level, and container-level cost allocation with real-time visibility. It integrates directly with the Kubernetes API and Prometheus for accurate resource attribution. Cloudability offers some Kubernetes support through its container cost allocation feature, but it's less granular than Kubecost. Infracost doesn't provide runtime Kubernetes visibility at all.

Q: Is Infracost free to use?

Infracost offers a generous free tier: the open-source CLI is completely free for unlimited local usage, and Infracost Cloud provides free CI/CD integration for up to 1,000 runs per month. Paid plans start at approximately $50/month per repo for teams needing advanced features like cost policies, team management, and custom price books. Enterprise pricing is available for organizations with custom requirements.

Q: How much does Cloudability cost compared to Kubecost?

Cloudability is significantly more expensive than Kubecost. Cloudability pricing typically starts at $65,000-$100,000+/year for enterprise contracts based on monitored cloud spend. Kubecost offers a free tier for single clusters, with paid plans starting at $199/month for Business tier (up to 10 clusters) and custom pricing for Enterprise. For organizations focused primarily on Kubernetes costs, Kubecost delivers better value; for enterprise-wide multi-cloud governance, Cloudability's premium may be justified.

Q: Which FinOps tool works best with Terraform?

Infracost is purpose-built for Terraform and is the best tool for IaC cost estimation. It parses Terraform plan files to estimate costs before infrastructure is deployed, integrates natively with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket PRs, and supports cost policies to block deployments exceeding thresholds. Neither Kubecost nor Cloudability provide pre-deployment Terraform cost estimation — they focus on runtime cost analysis after infrastructure is already provisioned.

A practitioner's guide to choosing between the three most popular FinOps tools — covering pricing, Kubernetes support, IaC integration, multi-cloud visibility, and when you need all three

Quick Answer: Which FinOps Tool Should You Choose?

Each tool excels in a different domain — the right choice depends on your primary cost challenge:

Infracost — Best for shift-left cost estimation in Terraform/OpenTofu CI/CD pipelines. Shows cost impact before you deploy
Kubecost — Best for Kubernetes cost allocation by namespace, pod, and label. Real-time visibility into container economics
Cloudability — Best for enterprise multi-cloud governance, executive reporting, and organization-wide showback/chargeback
All three together — Mature FinOps teams combine them: Infracost pre-deploy, Kubecost at runtime, Cloudability for governance

Executive Summary

The FinOps tool market has matured significantly by 2026, but tool selection remains one of the most common questions we hear from engineering and finance leaders. Infracost, Kubecost, and Cloudability represent three distinct approaches to cloud cost management — pre-deployment estimation, runtime container visibility, and enterprise governance — and understanding their strengths determines whether your FinOps investment delivers ROI.

This comparison is based on hands-on experience deploying all three tools across 40+ client environments ranging from seed-stage startups to publicly traded enterprises with $5M+/month cloud spend. We cover architecture, pricing, integration depth, Kubernetes capabilities, multi-cloud support, and the real-world trade-offs that vendor comparison pages won't tell you.

The key insight: these tools are complementary, not competing. Organizations that treat FinOps tooling as a stack — rather than a single-tool decision — consistently achieve 30-50% better cost optimization outcomes than those relying on any one tool alone.

What Is Infracost and How Does It Work?

Infracost is an open-source tool that estimates the cost of Terraform and OpenTofu changes before they are applied. It parses terraform plan JSON output, maps each resource to cloud provider pricing APIs, and produces a cost breakdown — either in the terminal, as a PR comment, or via the Infracost Cloud dashboard.

The core value proposition is shift-left cost awareness: engineers see the dollar impact of their infrastructure changes during code review, not weeks later on a billing dashboard. This prevents cost surprises and creates a feedback loop where teams naturally consider cost alongside performance and reliability.

Infracost Architecture and Key Features

Terraform/OpenTofu native: Parses plan files to extract resource configurations including instance types, storage volumes, data transfer, and usage-based services
CI/CD integration: Native plugins for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, and CircleCI with automatic PR comments
Cost policies: Define guardrails like “no single PR can increase monthly cost by more than $500” or “block GPU instances without manager approval”
Usage-based estimation: Supports usage files for resources with variable pricing (Lambda invocations, S3 requests, data transfer) that can't be determined from Terraform alone
Multi-cloud pricing: Covers AWS, Azure, and GCP pricing with daily pricing data updates from official APIs
Custom price books: Enterprise plans support EDP, PPA, and negotiated pricing so estimates reflect your actual contracted rates

# Basic Infracost usage in a CI pipeline terraform plan -out=tfplan.binary terraform show -json tfplan.binary > plan.json infracost breakdown --path plan.json # Output: # Name Monthly Qty Unit Monthly Cost # aws_instance.api_server # ├─ Instance usage (m6i.xlarge) 730 hours $138.70 # ├─ root_block_device (gp3, 100 GB) 100 GB $8.00 # └─ ebs_block_device (gp3, 500 GB) 500 GB $40.00 # # aws_rds_instance.primary # ├─ Database instance (db.r6g.xlarge) 730 hours $417.60 # └─ Storage (gp3, 200 GB) 200 GB $23.00 # # OVERALL TOTAL $627.30

Infracost Pricing (2026)

Open Source (Free): CLI tool for local usage, unlimited runs, community support
Infracost Cloud Free: Up to 1,000 CI/CD runs/month, PR comments, basic dashboard
Team ($50/repo/month): Cost policies, team management, Slack/Teams notifications, SSO
Enterprise (custom): Custom price books, self-hosted option, RBAC, audit logs, dedicated support

Infracost Limitation to Know

Infracost estimates costs based on Terraform plan output — it has no visibility into actual runtime usage. An EC2 instance running at 5% CPU costs the same as one at 95%. For identifying waste in running infrastructure, you need a complementary runtime tool like Kubecost or Cloudability.

What Is Kubecost and How Does It Work?

Kubecost is a Kubernetes-native cost monitoring platform that provides real-time cost allocation at the namespace, deployment, pod, and container level. It runs as a Helm deployment inside your cluster, integrates with Prometheus for metrics collection, and maps resource consumption to actual cloud billing data.

The core value proposition is answering the question that cloud provider billing dashboards cannot: “Which team, service, or feature is driving our Kubernetes costs?” Without Kubecost, you see node-level EC2 costs — with it, you see that the data-pipeline namespace consumes 40% of cluster resources while the api-gateway namespace uses only 8%.

Kubecost Architecture and Key Features

Namespace/pod cost allocation: Breaks down cluster costs to the pod and container level using actual CPU, memory, GPU, storage, and network consumption
Efficiency scoring: Shows resource utilization vs. requests/limits to identify over-provisioned workloads and right-sizing opportunities
Savings recommendations: Automated suggestions for right-sizing requests, spot instance adoption, and cluster consolidation with estimated savings
Multi-cluster support: Aggregates cost data across multiple Kubernetes clusters (EKS, GKE, AKS, on-prem) into a unified dashboard
Alerting: Cost anomaly alerts, budget threshold alerts, and efficiency alerts via Slack, PagerDuty, email, and webhooks
OpenCost foundation: Kubecost contributed OpenCost to the CNCF — the open-source engine powering its cost allocation model

# Install Kubecost via Helm helm repo add kubecost https://kubecost.github.io/cost-analyzer/ helm repo update helm install kubecost kubecost/cost-analyzer \ --namespace kubecost \ --create-namespace \ --set kubecostToken="YOUR_TOKEN" \ --set prometheus.server.persistentVolume.size=32Gi # Query costs via API curl -s http://localhost:9090/model/allocation \ --data-urlencode "window=7d" \ --data-urlencode "aggregate=namespace" \ --data-urlencode "accumulate=true" | jq '.data[0] | to_entries | sort_by(-.value.totalCost) | .[:5] | .[] | {namespace: .key, cost: .value.totalCost}' # Example output: # {"namespace": "data-pipeline", "cost": 2847.32} # {"namespace": "api-services", "cost": 1923.18} # {"namespace": "ml-training", "cost": 1456.90} # {"namespace": "monitoring", "cost": 412.55} # {"namespace": "api-gateway", "cost": 289.74}

Kubecost Pricing (2026)

Free Tier: Single cluster, 15 days of metrics retention, basic cost allocation, community support
Business ($199/month): Up to 10 clusters, 30 days retention, SSO, multi-cluster views, priority support
Enterprise (custom): Unlimited clusters, unlimited retention, SAML/OIDC, RBAC, dedicated CSM, SLA
OpenCost (Free OSS): CNCF sandbox project with core allocation engine — no UI, API only

Kubecost Limitation to Know

Kubecost only sees Kubernetes workloads. If 60% of your cloud spend is on managed services (RDS, ElastiCache, S3, Lambda, SQS), Kubecost provides no visibility into that spend. It also doesn't estimate costs before deployment — it's strictly a runtime monitoring tool. For a complete FinOps picture, pair it with a tool that covers non-K8s resources.

What Is Cloudability and How Does It Work?

Cloudability (now part of Apptio, acquired by IBM) is an enterprise FinOps platform that provides multi-cloud cost management, showback/chargeback, budgeting, forecasting, and optimization recommendations. It ingests billing data from AWS, Azure, GCP, and other providers to create a unified cost visibility layer across the entire organization.

The core value proposition is organizational governance: Cloudability enables finance teams, engineering leaders, and executives to understand, allocate, and optimize cloud costs at scale. While Infracost targets individual engineers in PRs and Kubecost targets platform teams in cluster dashboards, Cloudability targets the VP of Engineering asking “why did our cloud bill go up 25% this quarter?”

Cloudability Architecture and Key Features

Multi-cloud billing ingestion: Connects to AWS CUR, Azure Cost Management, GCP BigQuery billing export, and 30+ SaaS providers for unified cost data
Business mapping: Map cloud resources to business dimensions (teams, products, customers, cost centers) with flexible allocation rules beyond simple tagging
Showback/chargeback: Generate allocation reports for internal billing, complete with shared cost distribution and amortized commitment discounts
Optimization recommendations: Right-sizing, reservation planning, spot instance opportunities, and idle resource identification across all clouds
Anomaly detection: ML-based cost anomaly detection with configurable sensitivity and automated alerting
Container cost allocation: Kubernetes cost visibility through a collector agent, supporting namespace-level allocation (less granular than Kubecost)

Cloudability Pricing (2026)

No free tier: Cloudability is an enterprise product with annual contracts and no self-serve free plan
Standard (from ~$65K/year): Multi-cloud visibility, business mapping, basic recommendations, standard support
Enterprise (from ~$100K+/year): Advanced analytics, anomaly detection, custom integrations, container support, premium support
Pricing model: Typically based on total monitored cloud spend — expect 1-3% of annual cloud costs as the licensing fee

Cloudability Limitation to Know

Cloudability's enterprise pricing puts it out of reach for startups and mid-market companies with <$500K/month cloud spend. The ROI only works at scale. It also has no shift-left integration — no PR comments, no CI/CD pipeline integration for pre-deployment cost estimation. And its Kubernetes cost allocation, while functional, lacks the pod-level granularity that Kubecost provides.

How Do These Tools Compare Head-to-Head?

The following table summarizes the key differences across 15 dimensions that matter most when selecting a FinOps tool.

Capability	Infracost	Kubecost	Cloudability
Primary focus	Pre-deploy IaC estimation	K8s runtime cost allocation	Enterprise multi-cloud governance
Pricing	Free OSS + $50/repo/mo	Free tier + $199/mo	$65K–$100K+/year
Cloud support	AWS, Azure, GCP	Any K8s cluster	AWS, Azure, GCP, 30+ SaaS
Terraform integration	Native (core feature)	None	None
Kubernetes visibility	None	Namespace/pod/container	Namespace-level (collector)
Pre-deploy estimation	Yes (core feature)	No	No
Runtime monitoring	No	Yes (real-time)	Yes (hourly/daily lag)
Multi-cloud unified view	Cost estimation only	K8s clusters only	Yes (full billing data)
Showback / chargeback	No	K8s namespaces only	Yes (full business mapping)
Anomaly detection	No	Basic (budget alerts)	Advanced (ML-based)
Right-sizing	No	Pods + node pools	EC2, RDS, Azure VMs
RI/SP recommendations	No	No	Yes (cross-cloud)
CI/CD integration	Native PR comments	No	No
Deployment model	CLI + SaaS	In-cluster (Helm)	SaaS only
Best for	IaC-heavy eng. teams	K8s platform teams	Finance + exec leadership

What Are the Key Architectural Differences?

Understanding how each tool collects and processes cost data is critical for evaluating accuracy, latency, and operational overhead.

Infracost: Static Analysis of IaC Plans

Infracost operates entirely at the plan phase. It takes Terraform plan JSON as input, extracts resource configurations, and queries a pricing database (updated daily from AWS/Azure/GCP pricing APIs) to produce estimates. There is no agent, no runtime component, and no access to your cloud account billing data. This means zero operational overhead but also zero runtime visibility.

Kubecost: In-Cluster Prometheus Integration

Kubecost deploys as a set of pods inside your Kubernetes cluster. It uses Prometheus (either an existing installation or a bundled one) to collect resource consumption metrics from the Kubernetes Metrics Server. It then correlates these metrics with cloud provider pricing (via CUR for AWS, billing export for GCP, or pricing APIs) to calculate per-pod costs. Data is stored locally in the cluster with configurable retention.

Cloudability: SaaS Billing Data Ingestion

Cloudability is a fully managed SaaS platform. It ingests billing data by connecting to AWS Cost and Usage Reports (via S3 bucket access), Azure Cost Management APIs, and GCP BigQuery billing exports. Data processing happens in Cloudability's infrastructure — you configure IAM roles/service accounts for read-only access to billing data. For Kubernetes visibility, a lightweight collector agent runs in each cluster.

Which Tool Is Best for Kubernetes Cost Optimization?

If Kubernetes cost visibility is your primary concern, the winner is clear: Kubecost. Here's why the other tools fall short.

Kubecost: Pod-level cost allocation with CPU, memory, GPU, persistent volume, and network costs. Efficiency metrics show request vs. actual usage. Right-sizing recommendations at the container level. Real-time data with sub-minute resolution. Supports custom cost metrics via Prometheus labels
Cloudability: Namespace-level allocation via a collector agent. Less granular — no pod-level breakdown in the default view. Requires additional configuration for label-based allocation. 1-4 hour data lag. Better suited for organizations that need K8s costs rolled up into a broader multi-cloud picture
Infracost: No Kubernetes runtime visibility. Can estimate the cost of EKS/GKE/AKS node groups and managed add-ons in Terraform, but has no concept of what runs inside the cluster

# Kubecost savings recommendations API curl -s http://localhost:9090/savings/requestSizing \ --data-urlencode "window=14d" \ --data-urlencode "targetUtilization=0.8" | jq '.[] | select(.monthlySavings > 50) | { namespace: .namespace, controller: .controllerName, currentCPU: .currentCPURequest, recommendedCPU: .recommendedCPURequest, currentMemory: .currentMemoryRequest, recommendedMemory: .recommendedMemoryRequest, monthlySavings: .monthlySavings }' # Example output: # { # "namespace": "data-pipeline", # "controller": "spark-executor", # "currentCPU": "4000m", # "recommendedCPU": "1500m", # "currentMemory": "8Gi", # "recommendedMemory": "4Gi", # "monthlySavings": 342.80 # }

Which Tool Is Best for Infrastructure-as-Code Teams?

For organizations managing infrastructure through Terraform, OpenTofu, or Pulumi, Infracost is the only tool in this comparison that provides pre-deployment cost estimation. Neither Kubecost nor Cloudability can tell you what a Terraform change will cost before you apply it.

Infracost in CI/CD: The Developer Experience

The typical Infracost workflow adds a step to your Terraform CI pipeline that generates a cost diff and posts it as a PR comment. Engineers see output like “This change increases monthly cost from $2,340 to $3,180 (+$840/month)” — complete with line-item breakdowns for each resource. This creates a natural cost conversation during code review, before anything reaches production.

# GitHub Actions workflow with Infracost name: Infracost on: [pull_request] jobs: infracost: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v4 - name: Setup Infracost uses: infracost/actions/setup@v3 with: api-key: ${{ secrets.INFRACOST_API_KEY }} - name: Generate Infracost diff run: | infracost diff \ --path=. \ --format=json \ --compare-to=infracost-base.json \ --out-file=/tmp/infracost.json - name: Post PR comment run: | infracost comment github \ --path=/tmp/infracost.json \ --repo=${{ github.repository }} \ --pull-request=${{ github.event.pull_request.number }} \ --github-token=${{ github.token }} \ --behavior=update

Cost Policies: Automated Guardrails

Infracost Cloud supports policy-as-code rules that can warn or block PRs based on cost impact. Common policies include: maximum monthly cost increase per PR, banned instance types (e.g., previous-gen instances), required approval for changes exceeding a threshold, and environment-specific budgets.

Which Tool Is Best for Enterprise Multi-Cloud Governance?

For organizations operating across AWS, Azure, and GCP with centralized finance requirements, Cloudability is the strongest option. Its business mapping, showback/chargeback, and executive reporting capabilities are designed for the complexity of enterprise cloud governance.

Business Mapping vs Tag-Based Allocation

Where most FinOps tools rely exclusively on resource tags for cost allocation, Cloudability's business mapping engine supports rule-based allocation. You can define hierarchical mappings: “All resources in AWS account 1234 belong to Product Team A, except those tagged Environment=shared, which are split 60/40 between Team A and Team B.” This handles the messy reality of shared infrastructure that pure tagging cannot.

Reservation and Commitment Optimization

Cloudability's reservation management is the most sophisticated of the three tools. It analyzes usage patterns across your entire multi-cloud estate to recommend optimal commitment portfolios — balancing Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, CUDs (GCP), and spot/preemptible instances. It tracks existing commitments, identifies underutilized reservations, and models different commitment scenarios.

Cross-cloud comparison: Compare commitment options across AWS (RIs + Savings Plans), Azure (Reserved VMs + Savings Plans), and GCP (CUDs) to optimize total commitment spend
Amortization logic: Properly amortize upfront RI/SP payments across their term for accurate monthly cost allocation
Expiration management: Track upcoming commitment expirations with recommended renewal strategies based on current usage trends

How Should You Decide Which Tool to Use?

Rather than a single-axis comparison, use this decision framework based on your organization's profile.

Decision Framework by Organization Type

Startup (<$50K/month cloud, IaC-driven): Start with Infracost free tier for cost awareness in PRs + AWS Cost Explorer for runtime analysis. Total cost: $0. This covers 80% of your needs until scale demands more
Growth-stage (Kubernetes-heavy, $50K-$200K/month): Infracost for IaC estimation + Kubecost free tier for K8s allocation. Upgrade Kubecost to Business tier when you hit multi-cluster. Total cost: $50-250/month
Mid-market (multi-cloud, $200K-$1M/month): Infracost + Kubecost + evaluate Cloudability vs. building custom dashboards with CUR/BigQuery. Cloudability ROI becomes positive around $300K+/month spend
Enterprise (>$1M/month, multi-BU): All three tools, each covering their domain. Cloudability for governance + Kubecost for K8s + Infracost for IaC. The combined tooling cost (<$200K/year) pays for itself many times over at this spend level

Decision Framework by Primary Challenge

“Engineers deploy expensive resources without knowing the cost” → Infracost (shift-left estimation in PRs)
“We can't attribute Kubernetes costs to teams” → Kubecost (namespace/label-based allocation)
“Finance needs monthly showback reports across all clouds” → Cloudability (business mapping + reporting)
“We need to optimize our RI/SP portfolio” → Cloudability (cross-cloud commitment optimization)
“Pods are over-provisioned and wasting resources” → Kubecost (request right-sizing recommendations)
“We want cost guardrails in our IaC pipeline” → Infracost (cost policies in CI/CD)

Case Study: Series C SaaS Company Implements a Three-Tool FinOps Stack

A 200-engineer SaaS company running $420K/month across AWS and GCP struggled with cost attribution. Engineering blamed “cloud price increases” while finance demanded team-level chargeback. After a FinOps maturity assessment, we implemented all three tools in phases:

Week 1-2 — Infracost: Added to all 12 Terraform repos. Within the first sprint, engineers caught a PR that would have added $8,400/month in over-provisioned RDS instances. Cost policies blocked 3 additional high-cost changes that were reworked to use smaller instance types
Week 3-4 — Kubecost: Deployed to 4 EKS clusters and 2 GKE clusters. Discovered that 35% of Kubernetes resources were requested but unused. Right-sizing recommendations freed up capacity equivalent to 12 nodes ($18,600/month). Identified 3 orphaned namespaces from decommissioned microservices costing $2,800/month
Month 2-3 — Cloudability: Connected AWS CUR and GCP billing exports. Business mapping allocated shared infrastructure costs (monitoring, networking, DNS) across 8 product teams. Finance got their first accurate team-level cost report. RI/SP optimization recommendations identified $31,000/month in additional savings

Total impact: $60,800/month ($729,600/year) in savings and cost avoidance against $180K/year in combined tooling costs — a 4:1 ROI in the first year

What About Open-Source Alternatives?

The FinOps ecosystem includes several open-source tools worth considering, especially if budget constraints rule out commercial options.

OpenCost (CNCF): The open-source core of Kubecost's allocation engine. Provides Kubernetes cost allocation via API without the Kubecost UI, dashboards, or optimization recommendations. Ideal for teams that want to build custom dashboards in Grafana
Infracost CLI (Open Source): The core Infracost CLI is fully open-source and free for local usage. The commercial layer (Infracost Cloud) adds CI/CD integration, team features, and cost policies
Cloud Custodian: Policy-as-code engine for cloud governance. Can enforce cost-related policies (tag compliance, instance type restrictions) but doesn't provide cost visibility or allocation
Komiser: Open-source cloud cost dashboard that aggregates data from multiple cloud providers. Lighter weight than Cloudability but with significantly fewer features

How Do You Implement a Multi-Tool FinOps Strategy?

Organizations that get the most value from FinOps tooling treat it as a layered stack, not a single-tool decision. Here's a practical implementation roadmap.

Phase 1: Foundation (Week 1-2)

Enable cloud provider native tools (AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, GCP Billing Console) — free baseline visibility
Deploy Infracost CLI to all Terraform repositories — immediate shift-left cost awareness at zero cost
Establish a cost allocation tagging strategy and enforce it via IaC validation

Phase 2: Container Visibility (Week 3-4)

Deploy Kubecost (or OpenCost) to all Kubernetes clusters for namespace-level cost allocation
Configure Kubecost to read from cloud billing data (CUR/billing export) for accurate pricing
Run initial right-sizing analysis and implement quick-win resource optimizations

Phase 3: Governance (Month 2-3)

If multi-cloud or enterprise scale: implement Cloudability with business mapping for showback/chargeback
Configure Infracost cost policies in CI/CD to enforce guardrails on new deployments
Establish monthly FinOps review cadence with data from all three tools feeding into a unified report

Phase 4: Optimization (Ongoing)

Use Kubecost recommendations for continuous K8s right-sizing and cluster consolidation
Use Cloudability for RI/SP portfolio optimization and anomaly detection
Use Infracost policies to prevent regressions — ensuring new deployments don't undo optimization gains

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use Infracost, Kubecost, and Cloudability together?

Yes — and many mature FinOps organizations do exactly that. These tools are complementary: Infracost handles pre-deployment IaC cost estimation, Kubecost provides runtime Kubernetes cost allocation, and Cloudability delivers enterprise-wide multi-cloud governance. Using all three gives you shift-left estimation, runtime container visibility, and executive reporting in a single stack.

Which tool is best for Kubernetes cost optimization?

Kubecost is the clear leader. It provides namespace-level, pod-level, and container-level cost allocation with real-time visibility, integrates with Prometheus, and offers automated right-sizing recommendations. Cloudability has basic K8s support via a collector agent, but less granular. Infracost doesn't provide runtime K8s visibility.

Is Infracost free to use?

The open-source CLI is completely free for unlimited local usage. Infracost Cloud offers a free tier with up to 1,000 CI/CD runs per month. Paid plans start at approximately $50/month per repo for teams needing cost policies, team management, and advanced features. Enterprise pricing is available for custom requirements.

How much does Cloudability cost compared to Kubecost?

Cloudability is significantly more expensive — typically $65,000-$100,000+/year for enterprise contracts based on monitored cloud spend. Kubecost offers a free tier for single clusters, with paid plans starting at $199/month. For K8s-focused organizations, Kubecost delivers better value; for enterprise multi-cloud governance, Cloudability's premium may be justified at > $300K/month cloud spend.

Which FinOps tool works best with Terraform?

Infracost is purpose-built for Terraform and OpenTofu. It parses plan files to estimate costs before deployment, integrates natively with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket PRs, and supports cost policies to block deployments exceeding thresholds. Neither Kubecost nor Cloudability provide pre-deployment Terraform cost estimation.

Need Help Building Your FinOps Tool Stack?

Our FinOps engineers help organizations select, deploy, and integrate the right combination of cost management tools. We've implemented Infracost, Kubecost, and Cloudability across 40+ environments — and our clients average 35% cloud cost reduction within 90 days.

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