I built a CLI that tells you where your Kubernetes money burns

Ozlem — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:40:02 +0000

Got tired of setting up dashboards just to answer "where does our K8s money go?"

So I built Burn — a CLI that shows you exactly which namespaces,

pods, and load balancers cost what. One command, no agent, no dashboard.

## What it looks like

  $ burn analyze --prometheus http://prometheus:9090     

  NAMESPACE            PODS  CPU REQ→USED   COST/MO
  argocd               4     2.0 → 30m      $56
  amazon-cloudwatch    11    1.6 → 82m      $44                                                                  
  kube-system          21    1.4 → 52m      $41
  ...and 7 more namespaces                                                                                       
  Idle (unallocated)                        $117                                                                 
  Total                                     $350                                                                 

  COST BREAKDOWN                                                                                                 
  Compute: $350 | Storage: $0 | LB: $16                                                                          
  Total: $367

argocd-dex-server requests 500m CPU, uses 0.12m. That's $14/month for 0.02% efficiency.

## Slack integration

It also works as a Slack bot. You just ask:

  /burn ask "what should I do to save money"                                                                     

  → 1. Switch to Spot — Save $277/mo                                                                             
    2. Rightsize argocd-dex-server (500m → 10m CPU)      
       $ kubectl set resources deployment argocd-dex-server -n argocd --requests=cpu=10m                         
    3. Delete forgotten rds-debug pods — $11/mo wasted

You ask a question, it gives you kubectl commands. No manual analysis.

## How it works

Pulls node and pod data from the Kubernetes API
Gets actual CPU/memory usage from Prometheus
Fetches real pricing from AWS and Azure APIs
Splits cost per resource (CPU and RAM priced independently)
Detects load balancers via both Service and Ingress resources
GPU nodes detected and priced automatically

## Install

  brew install tanrikuluozlem/burn/burn

Also available as Docker image, Helm chart, or Go binary.

## On-prem and GPU

Works with on-premise and GPU clusters too:

  burn analyze --cpu-price 0.05 --ram-price 0.008 --gpu-price 3.00

Open source, Apache 2.0: github.com/tanrikuluozlem/burn

What does your cluster idle cost look like? Curious if 33% waste is normal.

DEV Community: Ozlem

I built a CLI that tells you where your Kubernetes money burns