# IBM Kubecost

> IBM Kubecost provides Kubernetes cost visibility, allocation, optimization and governance for engineering and FinOps teams. Founded by former Google employees Webb Brown and Ajay Tripathy in 2019, the business joined IBM in September 2024 and is part of its Apptio portfolio. Free self-hosted and paid enterprise offerings translate shared infrastructure costs into workload, team and business reporting.

- **Founded:** 2019
- **Headquarters:** San Francisco, United States
- **Founders:** Webb Brown (Co-founder and CEO at acquisition), Ajay Tripathy (Co-founder and CTO at acquisition)
- **Products:** Kubecost Foundations, Kubecost Enterprise Self-hosted, Kubecost Enterprise Cloud, kubectl-cost, Kubecost 3.3 beta MCP server
- **Notable:** Company reported more than 2,000 users at the organization level and over $2 billion of Kubernetes spend under management in February 2022., Raised a $25 million Series A led by Coatue in February 2022., IBM announced its acquisition on September 17, 2024.

## Products & services

- **Kubecost Foundations** — Always-free self-hosted edition for unlimited clusters up to 250 cores, with 15-day metric retention and unlimited users.
- **Kubecost Enterprise Self-hosted** — Commercial deployment with unified multi-cluster reporting, unlimited metric retention, custom pricing, role-based access control and dedicated support.
- **Kubecost Enterprise Cloud** — Managed SaaS offering with a local cluster agent, managed updates, high availability and disaster recovery.
- **kubectl-cost** — Command-line tool for querying Kubernetes workload costs through Kubecost.
- **Kubecost 3.3 beta MCP server** — Read-only access to historical cost and usage insights for MCP-compatible AI clients.

## Achievements

- Company reported more than 2,000 users at the organization level and over $2 billion of Kubernetes spend under management in February 2022.
- Raised a $25 million Series A led by Coatue in February 2022.
- IBM announced its acquisition on September 17, 2024.
- Originally developed the OpenCost project, accepted into the CNCF Sandbox in 2022.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Version 3.3 introduced a read-only beta MCP server, refreshed Monitor pages, AWS NAT Gateway cost visibility, Namespace Turndown and AWS CUR 2.0 support.

## Links

- Website: https://www.apptio.com/products/kubecost/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kubecost/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/kubecost
- GitHub: https://github.com/kubecost
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsgfXYDdZXQ

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/ibm-kubecost
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-01