Pricing

Same platform. Pick your operator.

Every Jōkamachi cluster runs the same open-source software. What changes between plans is who watches the cluster — your operators, our operators, KAOS – and who has tenancy.

Open Source

€0self-hosted, free forever

Run by you.

• Bootstrap, Helm charts, kubenix management, operator manuals
• Public bug tracker — file issues without a support contract
• Read/write access to community forum

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Managed

+10% of running costs

+10% of running costs

Run by you and/or us.

• Automated provisioning, backups
• Cloud-hosted dashboard: curated metrics and live cost overview
• Updates and security patches of nodes and service mesh under consultation, per SLA tier

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Agentic

+10% of running costs+ KAOS tokens at pass-throughsubscription tier required (see below)

Run by KAOS, humans in the loop.

• Everything in Managed
• KAOS attached to your cluster
• Semi-automated updates and security patches of nodes and service mesh

Pilot KAOS

Subscription tiers

Pricing is per server, per month. The tier sets your coverage window, response-time SLA, and what’s included.

Every tier includes operation support, in-depth monitoring, automated alerts, and live-chat / ticket support. Details and consultation rates below.

Managed

Managed has three pricing components.

1. +10% of running costs — shared assets and custom components. Covers continued maintenance of the assets we share across all Jōkamachi clusters (Helm charts, kubenix modules, operator manuals) and ongoing development of our custom components — the dashboard and KAOS. It does not cover CVE patching, incident response, or any work specific to your cluster.
2. Per-server subscription — your operator retainer. A flat monthly fee per server that sets your coverage window, response SLA, and the size of your free consultation bucket. Operation support, in-depth monitoring, automated alerts, and live-chat / ticket support are included on every tier. Bronze and above add backup/recovery, free consultation hours, and a response-time SLA. See Subscription plans.
3. Consultation hours — for everything else. Advice, operations support, CVE patching, incident response, migrations, and custom engineering are billed under consultation. Your tier’s free consultation hours are drawn down first; any remainder is added to your monthly invoice at the hourly rate appropriate to the consultant level. Time is tracked per minute, per task, with a 15-minute minimum.

Automation reduces consultation hours, but does not eliminate them. Provisioning, upgrades, monitoring, alerting, and backups are automated by the open-source platform — but a human still authors, reviews, and operates them, and that work is billed under consultation. The closest you get to “free automation” is the Agentic plan, where KAOS resolves a class of work for the cost of its tokens.

You also get, on top of the Free plan:

• Cloud-hosted dashboard with curated cluster metrics, a live cost overview, audit log, and incident history. The Free platform ships the same raw metrics — Managed turns them into views your on-call can read under pressure, not a wall of Prometheus.
• Write access to the community forums, alongside Jōkamachi operators and other customers.

Tenancy: yours or ours

Managed Kubernetes runs on either your Hetzner account or ours. Pick whichever fits your billing and procurement reality.

Your tenancy

• You own the Hetzner account and pay Hetzner directly.
• +10% management fee attaches to your invoice.
• You provision additional Hetzner resources when the cluster needs more headroom — we tell you exactly what to add.

Jōkamachi tenancy

• We own the Hetzner account and run the cluster on it.
• The Hetzner invoice passes through to you with our +10% applied.
• We provision more resources when the cluster needs them, without waiting on you.

Either way, the +10% is the same and is calculated on the same running cost. The choice is about who pays the hosting bill and who lifts a finger when limits are reached — not about price.

Agentic is jōkamachi-tenancy only. KAOS is closed-source and lives on infrastructure we control.

Agentic

+10% of your running costs, plus token cost at pass-through. KAOS runs the cluster; humans stay in the loop.

• Everything in Managed, plus —
• The Kubernetes Agentic Operator Substrate (KAOS) attached to your cluster, observing metrics and events.
• Guardrails you control: KAOS can be advisory-only, scoped to specific namespaces, or granted apply rights with a human approval step. As the playbook for a class of incidents matures, you can promote KAOS from propose to approve to act on that class — keeping humans in the loop where the playbook is still settling, and out of the loop where the same incident has been resolved a hundred times the same way. The KAOS booklet covers the maturity tiers in detail.
• Tokens replace hours. Where Managed bills operator hours for manual interventions, Agentic resolves the same class of work in tokens — typically far cheaper, and visible live in the dashboard.
• Decision log streamed to the dashboard — every action KAOS proposes or takes, with the reasoning that led to it.

How tokens are billed

We bill the underlying model provider’s invoice through to you with no markup. A typical small cluster spends in the range of $X–$Y per month on KAOS tokens; the dashboard shows live spend and lets you cap it. Stub — replace $X–$Y once we have real numbers from production clusters.

Subscription plans

See the tier table above for prices, coverage, and response targets.

Every tier includes operation support, in-depth monitoring, automated alerts, support via live chat and ticket, and the +10% shared-asset and custom-component baseline (dashboard, audit log, cost overview, KAOS development).

Bronze and above additionally include:

• Backup and recovery.
• A monthly bucket of free consultation hours.
• An explicit response-time SLA at the tier’s coverage window.

Basic is the no-SLA tier — operation support and monitoring, discounted consultation rates, request-driven access.

Business hours are 08:00–17:00 in the customer’s primary time zone, on business days. Outside that window falls under the outside-business-hours rate for tiers whose coverage window is “business hours.”

Consultation rates

Advice, operations support, CVE patching, incident response, migrations, and bespoke engineering are billed under consultation. Free consultation hours included in your tier are drawn down first; any remainder is added to the monthly invoice. Time is tracked per minute, per task, with a 15-minute minimum. All consultation is remote.

Our specialists carry up to 25 years of operational experience.

Subscription required. Consultation hours must be related to a server or cluster covered by an active subscription. Non-subscriber slots are scheduled subject to consultant availability and have no SLA.

Consultation engagements

Typical work that consultation hours are spent on:

What “running costs” means

Your cloud provider’s invoice for the compute, storage, and network attached to the cluster — not your whole AWS/GCP/Azure account. We will either bill on top of an invoice you forward us, or run the cluster in an account we own and pass the invoice through. Either way the +10% is on cluster-attributable spend, not on your unrelated workloads.

Always included

• The open-source platform: automated provisioning, upgrades, monitoring, and backups. Authoring and operating the automation is consultation work — but the platform itself is yours to run.
• A copy of every booklet, kept in sync with the platform you’re on.
• The right to take your cluster and run it yourself at any time — there is nothing in Managed or Agentic that isn’t also in Free.