Kubernetes Cluster Pricing quantity and addons

Question

Hi Team,

I’m trying to estimate pricing of Kubernetes resourcs, I’m looking to deploy a 3 node kubernetes cluster,

For example - General Purpose Nodes - Regular CPU, I was selecting the quantiy 1 and Add Ons - 3 additonal nodes, But from i am reading in Internet, this means 4 WorkerNode Custer, Is my understanding correct, this mean total 4 Nodes and for 3 node cluster, i should select 2 additional node.

also, i wasn’t able to find any reference of this in Digital Ocean documentation, If you can also, please share any reference link. that would be good.

Kindly advise

Thanks \ Indranil Dutta

KFSys · Answer

Heya, Your understanding is correct. In the calculator the base quantity and the “additional nodes” add-on stack, so quantity 1 plus 3 additional is a 4 node pool. For a 3 node cluster you’d make it total 3 any way that adds up: quantity 1 plus 2 additional, or just quantity 3 with no add-ons. The only thing that affects the bill is the total node count in the pool, so pick whichever split is less confusing to read. A couple of things worth folding into the estimate while you’re there, since they catch people out. The worker nodes are all that line item covers, and they’re billed exactly like the equivalent VPS of that size, so a plain 3 node cluster is just 3 times your chosen node price. The standard control plane is free. If you switch on the HA control plane, which you’d want for production workloads that need the API server to survive failures, that adds $40/month on top. Load balancers and any Block Storage volumes for your PVCs are billed separately at their normal rates and aren’t part of the node price. For the reference you were after, the official breakdown is here: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/details/pricing/ — it lays out the control plane (free vs HA), the per-second node billing, and the 28 day monthly cap.

alexdo · Answer

Heya, @inddutcloud Two things worth knowing on top of that for an accurate estimate. First, surge upgrades: when DigitalOcean upgrades your cluster’s Kubernetes version, it briefly spins up duplicate nodes to do a rolling replacement, and those don’t cost extra, so if you see your node count tick above 4 for a short window during an upgrade, that’s expected and not a billing surprise. Second, on the actual math for the bill itself, DigitalOcean caps node billing at 28 days per month regardless of how many days are actually in that month, and the practical minimum charge per node is 60 seconds or $0.01, whichever is greater. Neither changes your 4 node estimate meaningfully, but they’re the kind of detail that explains a bill that doesn’t match a naive per-day multiplication. Hope that this helps!

Bobby · Answer

Hi there, I believe that your understanding is correct. The quantity you select is the starting node count and the add-ons are additional nodes on top of that. So if you select quantity 1 and add 3 additional nodes, you end up with 4 worker nodes total. For a 3 node cluster, select quantity 1 and add 2 additional nodes. For pricing, the DOKS control plane is free and you only pay for the worker nodes themselves at the standard Droplet rate for whichever plan you choose. So 3 general purpose nodes is just 3x the hourly rate of that node size. The most accurate way to estimate is to use the pricing calculator directly: https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/kubernetes And for the full DOKS documentation: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/kubernetes/

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Kubernetes Cluster Pricing quantity and addons

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