Here's the shit nobody puts in their glossy sales decks. Last year, our VMware licensing costs tripled overnight when Broadcom took over. No warning, no grandfathering - just "surprise, you now owe us $300k instead of $100k." According to Business Insider's survey, 73% of IT decision-makers experienced price hikes of at least 100% after the acquisition. That's the reality of enterprise Kubernetes platforms in 2025: vendors who will financially fuck you the moment they can get away with it.
Red Hat OpenShift: Works Great If You Have Infinite Money and Patience
Red Hat's pricing calculator says $0.17 per 4 vCPU/hour, which comes out to something like $1,500 per core annually if you're too scared to commit. Sign a 3-year deal and they'll drop it to around $667 per core - because nothing says "we trust your platform" like forcing customers into multi-year contracts to make it affordable.
Here's what happened when we deployed ROSA: Red Hat promised "fully managed" but we still needed at least two platform engineers to babysit it. The 9-node cluster they quoted at around $23k annually? We're paying somewhere north of $45k after all the add-ons - monitoring, logging, storage classes that don't suck, and all the other shit that should be included but isn't.
The real kicker? OpenShift Platform Plus costs 30-50% more than the base version, but you need it for anything resembling enterprise features. Their sales rep spent 3 hours explaining why we "absolutely needed" Advanced Cluster Security for compliance, then it took us 6 months to get it working correctly because the documentation is fucking useless - half the examples are from version 4.8 and don't work in 4.14.
VMware Tanzu: Broadcom's Financial Terrorism Campaign
Remember when VMware was just expensive instead of actively malicious? Broadcom bought them and immediately said "fuck every existing customer." Our perpetual licenses that we paid $200k for? Worthless. Now we pay something like $225 per core forever, plus they make you pay for at least 16 cores even if you're running dual-core stuff. IDC's analysis confirms this restructuring has caused cost increases at both purchase and renewal for most organizations.
The pricing lists show around $337k for a 500-core package, but that's just the beginning of your financial nightmare. Remember those nice perpetual licenses that cost us maybe $50k annually? Now it's north of $200k per year for the same fucking hardware.
Best part? Their support quality fell off a cliff after the acquisition. Used to get actual engineers on support calls. Now you get offshore tier-1 support reading scripts, and good luck getting escalation to someone who knows what a Kubernetes pod is. We're actively migrating away because staying with VMware feels like paying protection money to the mob.
SUSE Rancher: The Only Vendor With Straightforward Pricing (Which Says Everything)
SUSE seems to be the only company that publishes real pricing instead of "contact sales" bullshit. Around $990 per node annually for small deployments, dropping to maybe $760 per node for bigger installations. No per-core math, no minimum licensing requirements, no "surprise, we're changing everything" moments.
Here's the thing - Rancher actually works pretty well until you need something that isn't basic Kubernetes. Want integrated CI/CD? Good luck. Need advanced networking features? Time to bolt on more tools. Their support is decent though - actual engineers answer tickets instead of chatbots reading FAQ entries.
The trade-off is simple: you pay less but get less. Rancher vs OpenShift comparisons show that while OpenShift has more robust security features, Rancher offers a completely open-source platform with no licensing cost for the base version. Rancher Prime costs 20-30% more and includes security scanning that catches about half the vulnerabilities our dedicated scanner finds. For mid-market companies that just need Kubernetes without the enterprise theater, it's honestly not bad. Just don't expect it to solve problems Red Hat charges extra for.
The Scrappy Alternatives: Platform9 and the "Do You Feel Lucky?" Options
Google Anthos is "contact sales" hell just like everyone else. They want OpenShift money for a platform that's basically GKE with extra steps. Pass.
Platform9 starts at $160 per node annually, which sounds amazing until you realize they have like 200 enterprise customers total. You're betting your production workloads on a startup that could get acquired or shut down next quarter. Their managed service actually works pretty well, but do you really want to explain to your CTO why the entire platform disappeared because some VC fund decided to pivot?
Same deal with Mirantis - cheap and functional until something breaks at 3AM and you realize their "enterprise support" is two guys in Ukraine with a Slack channel. For scrappy startups or companies that love living dangerously, these platforms can save serious money. For enterprises that need to sleep at night, stick with the devil you know.
The Hidden Costs Nobody Tells You About (Until It's Too Late)
Here's where they really fuck you. The platform license is just the entry fee - like buying a concert ticket and finding out drinks cost $20 each.
Professional services will absolutely destroy your budget. Red Hat quoted us around $200k for migration "services" that basically amounted to "here's some Ansible playbooks we copied from GitHub and good luck debugging when they fail." VMware wanted something like $400k to migrate our existing VMs to Tanzu, then 3 months into the project their consultant told us our networking setup was "incompatible" and we needed to redesign our entire fucking infrastructure.
Training is another scam. Something like $8k per engineer for Red Hat certification that teaches you how to click buttons in their web console. Half the certified engineers we hired couldn't debug a failing pod without Googling the error message.
The real killer is operational overhead. We went from 1 ops engineer managing our VMs to 3 platform engineers managing our "simplified" Kubernetes setup. Each one costs us between $140-160k depending on experience, plus they need expensive monitoring tools, log aggregation, service mesh licenses, and backup solutions that actually work. This aligns with CNCF's FinOps research showing that organizations are focused on reducing waste, but most underestimate the true total cost of ownership for Kubernetes deployments.
Multi-cloud? Forget about it. Data transfer fees alone will bankrupt you. We're spending somewhere around $30k monthly just moving data between AWS regions for our "highly available" setup that goes down every time someone sneezes wrong in us-east-1. According to Cast AI's 2025 cost benchmark, most organizations are surprised by their monthly cloud bills and the gap between provisioned and actual CPU/memory utilization.