How much does K3s cost?

K3s publishes a single tier, K3s, at Free.

Does K3s have a free plan?

Yes. The K3s tier costs nothing and covers full functionality, no usage limits, community support.

Which cloud tools can I use without paying?

8 of the 8 cloud tools listed alongside K3s have a free tier: Zipkin, HAProxy, Thanos, Flux, Kustomize.

Does K3s charge per user?

The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 1 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.

Are these K3s prices current?

They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.

What should I compare K3s against before paying?

The closest cloud tools in this directory are Zipkin, HAProxy, Thanos, Flux. Each has a side-by-side comparison with K3s covering price, platforms and features.

Cloud · pricing

K3s pricing

K3s publishes a single tier. Below is what it costs, what it covers, and how that compares with the cloud tools listed alongside it.

Entry price: Free
Model: Open source, no licence fee
Tiers: 1
Free tier: Yes

K3s plans, side by side

Every published tier in ascending order of price, with the number of features each one lists. An absence here means the record does not itemise it, not that the tier lacks it.

K3s pricing tiers
Plan	Price	Features listed	Step up from the tier below
K3s	Free	3	Entry tier

Where K3s stops being free

K3s, Free

Full functionality
No usage limits
Community support

No paid tier on record

K3s lists a free tier and no priced tier above it in the record we hold.

What the product covers

The full K3s feature record, grouped as the catalogue groups it. This is the product as a whole; the record does not map every feature onto a specific tier.

Other

Single binary
SQLite by default
Certified conformant
Batteries included
Low resource footprint
Simple install

People bring K3s in for kubernetes on edge sites and iot hardware where full clusters will not fit, development and ci clusters that must start fast and cost nothing, small production clusters where full kubernetes is more operations than the workload justifies, teaching and learning kubernetes without cloud spend. If that is not the job you are buying for, the alternatives to K3s are worth a look before you commit to a tier.

How that compares in Cloud

Too few cloud tools in this directory publish a starting price to quote a meaningful median, so the table below is a like-for-like list rather than a ranking.

K3s entry price against other Cloud tools
Tool	Entry price	Model	Rated	Head to head
K3s (this page)	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-
Zipkin	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs K3s
HAProxy	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs K3s
Thanos	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs K3s
Flux	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs K3s
Kustomize	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs K3s
VictoriaMetrics	Free	Open source, no licence fee	-	vs K3s

Ratings are aggregated from third-party sources and imported with each catalogue entry, they are not reviews hosted on Softwr. How each figure is used is set out on the K3s badges page.

Before you pay for K3s

Three things this page cannot tell you, and all three change the bill. The record carries a price and a billing period but not the unit - per-seat and flat-rate pricing are indistinguishable in this data, so a five-person team may be looking at five times the figure above. It carries no annual rate, so any discount for paying yearly is not something this page can quote. And it carries no trial length.

What it can tell you is the shape of the ladder: a single tier at Free. Because there is a free tier, the cheapest way to answer the rest is to use it before paying anything.

K3s runs on linux, arm, self-hosted, and is published by SUSE of Nuremberg, Germany. The full record is on the K3s review, and the rest of the category is under best cloud tools.

K3s pricing on the vendor's own site

K3s pricing questions

How much does K3s cost?: K3s publishes a single tier, K3s, at Free.
Does K3s have a free plan?: Yes. The K3s tier costs nothing and covers full functionality, no usage limits, community support.
Which cloud tools can I use without paying?: 8 of the 8 cloud tools listed alongside K3s have a free tier: Zipkin, HAProxy, Thanos, Flux, Kustomize.
What am I actually paying for with K3s?: The record lists 6 features across 1 area: other. In practice it is brought in for kubernetes on edge sites and iot hardware where full clusters will not fit, development and ci clusters that must start fast and cost nothing, small production clusters where full kubernetes is more operations than the workload justifies.
Does K3s charge per user?: The record carries a price and a billing period for each of its 1 tiers, but not the unit that price is charged in. Per-seat and flat-rate billing look identical in this data, so check the vendor's page before budgeting for a team.
Are these K3s prices current?: They are what the catalogue entry holds, refreshed when the entry is. Vendors change pricing without notice and nobody at Softwr re-verifies each tier by hand, so treat this as a structured summary and the vendor's own pricing page as the authority.
What should I compare K3s against before paying?: The closest cloud tools in this directory are Zipkin, HAProxy, Thanos, Flux. Each has a side-by-side comparison with K3s covering price, platforms and features.