Pricing
One price, whatever size the cluster is.
US $12,000 a year, per cluster. Not per core, not per socket, not per node. Add capacity and the licence does not move.
A worked example
Eleven nodes, 396 vCPUs.
A mid-sized production cluster: three control-plane nodes for quorum and eight workers carrying the load, each worker at 36 vCPUs and 64 GB — 288 worker vCPUs, or 144 worker cores.
OpenShift and Tanzu are licensed per core, at rates negotiated per customer, which is why no figure for them is printed here — a published number would be wrong for almost every reader. Instead, BKE's flat fee converted into their unit:
| BKE, per cluster, per year | US $12,000 |
| Per worker core (144 cores) | US $83.33 |
| Per worker vCPU (288 vCPUs) | US $41.67 |
Take the per-core rate from the quote in front of you, multiply it by your worker cores, and set the result beside the flat fee. On this reference cluster, a per-core rate of US $100 is US $14,400 a year; US $250 is US $36,000; US $500 is US $72,000. The flat fee does not grow with the cluster.
GET mamluk.net/data/bke-pricing.json
US $12,000/ cluster / year
- Flat, irrespective of node count, CPU or memory.
- Every component included — no editions, no feature flags, no per-component upsell.
- A running cluster never depends on the licence. It gates install and upgrade only.
- Support & maintenance contracts, including a 24/7 tier, on request.
Scope
What one licence covers.
A licence covers one cluster, identified by its control-plane endpoint. Per-core licensing is why organisations consolidate development, staging and test into a single namespaced cluster; against that shape a flat fee per cluster is usually still the cheaper arrangement — and where it is not, the comparison above makes it visible rather than hiding it.