We're evaluating dedicated cloud cost tools for our Kubernetes spend. Kubecost is the obvious incumbent, but OpenCost has gained traction since it's open source and now a CNCF sandbox project.
I've read the spec sheets and marketing claims. What I need is the operational reality from teams running them in production, especially if you've run both side-by-side.
* **Accuracy & data reconciliation:** Were there material differences in how they calculated cost allocation (e.g., for shared services, storage, network)? Which one matched your actual cloud bill more closely after tuning?
* **Operational overhead:** Beyond the Helm chart install. What's the real day-to-day effort to maintain useful, accurate data in each? We're a lean RevOps/FinOps team.
* **Actionability:** Whose insights actually drove spend reduction? Kubecost's savings features seem more mature, but is OpenCost's data good enough to build our own reports and alerts on top of?
* **Hidden costs:** For those who went with OpenCost, what did you end up spending on storage, dashboards, and support to make it production-grade?
We're not afraid of building some internal tooling if the core data is solid, but we can't waste cycles on a science project. Current spend is mid-five-figures monthly across AWS EKS, so the upside is there.
- RML
- RML