Honest pricing for fleet operations
Unlimited servers on every plan — including free. Your hardware, your electricity, your bandwidth. We don't charge you for what's already yours.
forever
- Unlimited servers
- All templates & deployments
- GPU placement & secrets
- Full deployment history
- Logs & monitoring
- 1 team member
No credit card. No trial. Just free.
per organization
- Everything in Free
- 5 team members
- 5 clusters
- Cloud catalog & fleet API
- Image registry cache (50 GB)
- Email support
For growing teams
Compare plans
| Feature | Free | Pro | Business | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Servers | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Clusters | 1 | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Team members | 1 | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Templates & deployments | All | All | All | All |
| GPU placement | ||||
| Secrets management | ||||
| Deployment history & rollback | ||||
| Logs & monitoring | ||||
| Cloud catalog & fleet API | ||||
| Image registry cache | 50 GB | 500 GB | Unlimited | |
| Private template catalogs | ||||
| SSO & audit logs | ||||
| On-premise control plane | ||||
| Managed operations | ||||
| Support | Community | Priority email | Dedicated |
Why unlimited servers on every plan?
Because we price based on what costs us money — and your servers don't.
PodWarden runs on your hardware. Your compute, your electricity, your bandwidth. We don't host your containers, store your data, or provision your infrastructure. When you add a server to your fleet, nothing happens on our end. There is no marginal cost to us, so there's no charge to you.
Most container management tools charge $20–40 per server per month. Some charge per CPU core. A team with 15 servers is looking at $300–600/month before they've even deployed anything — for software that runs entirely on machines they already own and operate.
We think pricing should track cost. The things that cost us money — cloud infrastructure, registry storage, support — are behind paid tiers. The things that don't cost us money — software running on your machine — are free.
Per-server pricing also creates a perverse incentive: it discourages you from scaling. A management tool that punishes you for growing your fleet works against its own purpose.
This was one of the reasons we built PodWarden. We wanted a pricing model that helps infrastructure teams operate effectively, not one designed to extract maximum revenue from every server they add.
How this compares to what's out there
Per-node container management tools
Typically $20–40 per server per month. A 10-server fleet costs $200–400/month. Some cap CPU cores per node and charge more if you exceed them. Enterprise pricing is custom and often runs into thousands per month for what is essentially the same software with a support contract.
PodWarden: unlimited servers, $0.
Self-hosted PaaS platforms
Usually free and open source, which is great. But most are single-server or lack GPU awareness, multi-cluster management, secrets storage, and fleet-wide operations. They're designed for deploying web apps on a VPS, not managing heterogeneous infrastructure with GPUs.
PodWarden: multi-cluster, GPU-aware, fleet-first.
Enterprise Kubernetes platforms
$7,000–10,000 per server per year. Priced for organizations with dedicated platform teams. Recently, some have shifted from per-node to per-CPU-core pricing — making it even more expensive for bare-metal deployments.
PodWarden: Kubernetes under the hood without the Kubernetes price tag.
Hosted cloud platforms
Usage-based pricing on top of their infrastructure. Convenient, but you're paying both the platform fee and the compute markup. Good for small projects, expensive at scale, and your data lives on someone else's servers.
PodWarden: bring your own infrastructure, keep your data.
Need PodWarden at scale?
For organizations managing large fleets, the Enterprise plan includes things that smaller teams don't need but larger operations can't live without.
On-premise control plane
Run PodWarden Cloud inside your own network. No data leaves your infrastructure. Full air-gap support.
Managed operations
We don't just give you the tool — we help you operate it. Fleet setup, migration assistance, ongoing guidance from our engineering team.
Compliance & security
Audit logs, SSO enforcement, security review documentation. What your compliance team needs to sign off.
Custom integrations
Priority roadmap input, custom API integrations, and dedicated engineering support for your specific deployment requirements.
Common questions
Is the free tier actually free, or is it a trial?
Actually free. No credit card, no time limit, no “first 14 days” trick. Unlimited servers, all core features, forever. We mean it.
What happens if I add 50 servers on the free plan?
It works. There are no server limits on any plan. Add 5 servers or 500 — PodWarden manages them all. The paid plans add team collaboration, cloud features, and image caching. The core fleet management is free for everyone.
What's the image registry cache?
Docker images can disappear. Maintainers delete tags, Docker Hub enforces pull rate limits, registries go down. The image registry cache stores copies of the container images your templates use, so your deployments aren't dependent on third-party uptime. Pro gets 50 GB, Business gets 500 GB, Enterprise gets unlimited.
What does “per organization” mean?
One price covers your entire organization. Not per user, not per server, not per cluster. One organization, one bill. The plan limits apply to team member count and cluster count, not servers or deployments.
Do you offer SLAs?
PodWarden runs on your infrastructure, not ours. We can't guarantee uptime for servers and networks we don't control. What we can guarantee is that we respond fast and do our best to help. Enterprise customers get a dedicated account manager and direct access to our engineering team.
Can I switch plans anytime?
Yes. Upgrade or downgrade at any time. If you downgrade, you keep access to paid features until the end of your billing period. No contracts, no cancellation fees.
What if I want to stop using PodWarden?
Your clusters are standard K3s. Your templates are Docker containers, not a proprietary format. Uninstall PodWarden and your infrastructure keeps running. You can migrate to kubectl, ArgoCD, Flux, or any Kubernetes tooling — the clusters are already there.
Where are my secrets stored?
On your PodWarden instance, encrypted at rest with AES-256. The encryption key lives on your infrastructure, not ours. If you use the free tier, your secrets never leave your network.
What happens if PodWarden Cloud goes down?
Your running infrastructure is unaffected. PodWarden Cloud provides the catalog, fleet API, and image cache. Your local PodWarden instances operate independently — deployments, secrets, and monitoring all continue working.