Crossplane Pricing

Crossplane Pricing Overview

Crossplane is completely free and open-source software under the Apache 2.0 license. There are no licensing fees, subscription costs, or per-user charges. Organizations pay only for the Kubernetes infrastructure where Crossplane runs.

Infrastructure Costs

Running Crossplane requires a Kubernetes cluster. Costs include the Kubernetes control plane (EKS, AKS, GKE, or self-managed), worker nodes, storage, and networking. For small teams, this might be a single cluster; larger deployments may use dedicated control planes.

Upbound Commercial Offering

Upbound, founded by Crossplane creators, offers a commercial platform called Upbound Cloud and Upbound Enterprise. These add managed control planes, team collaboration, RBAC, and enterprise support. Pricing starts at $500 per month for the Team plan.

Cost Comparison to Alternatives

While Crossplane itself is free, the operational overhead of managing Kubernetes-based infrastructure should be factored in. For organizations already running Kubernetes, the marginal cost is low. For those new to K8s, the learning investment may offset the licensing savings.