Honest pricing for fleet operations
Unlimited servers on every plan — including free. Built-in ingress, DDNS, and HTTPS on every plan. Your hardware, your electricity, your bandwidth.
forever
- Unlimited servers
- All templates & deployments
- GPU placement & secrets
- Full deployment history
- Logs & monitoring
- 1 team member
- 1 DDNS subdomain
- Ingress & reverse proxy
No credit card. No trial. Just free.
per organization
- Everything in Free
- 5 team members
- 5 clusters
- 50 DDNS subdomains + custom slugs
- Cloud catalog & fleet API
- Image registry cache (50 GB)
- Email support
For growing teams
Compare plans
| Feature | Free | Pro | Business | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Servers | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Clusters | 1 | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Team members | 1 | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Templates & deployments | All | All | All | All |
| GPU placement | ||||
| Secrets management | ||||
| Deployment history & rollback | ||||
| Logs & monitoring | ||||
| Network awareness | ||||
| DDNS subdomains | 1 | 50 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Custom slugs | ||||
| Bring your own domain | ||||
| Ingress & reverse proxy | ||||
| Cloud catalog & fleet API | ||||
| Image registry cache | 50 GB | 500 GB | Unlimited | |
| Private template catalogs | ||||
| SSO & audit logs | ||||
| On-premise control plane | ||||
| Managed operations | ||||
| Support | Community | Priority email | Dedicated |
Why unlimited servers on every plan?
Because we price based on what costs us money — and your servers don't.
PodWarden runs on your hardware. Your compute, your electricity, your bandwidth. We don't host your containers, store your data, or provision your infrastructure. When you add a server to your fleet, nothing happens on our end. There is no marginal cost to us, so there's no charge to you.
Most container management tools charge $20–40 per server per month. Some charge per CPU core. A team with 15 servers is looking at $300–600/month before they've even deployed anything — for software that runs entirely on machines they already own and operate.
We think pricing should track cost. The things that cost us money — cloud infrastructure, registry storage, support — are behind paid tiers. The things that don't cost us money — software running on your machine — are free.
Per-server pricing also creates a perverse incentive: it discourages you from scaling. A management tool that punishes you for growing your fleet works against its own purpose.
This was one of the reasons we built PodWarden. We wanted a pricing model that helps infrastructure teams operate effectively, not one designed to extract maximum revenue from every server they add.
What you get vs. what others charge
Same capabilities, fraction of the cost. Most of it is free.
Unlimited servers. Multi-cluster. GPU placement. Secrets. Backups. DDNS & HTTPS. 117 AI/MCP tools. All included, all free.
Per-node pricing, per-core pricing, vCPU caps, enterprise tiers behind sales calls. Costs scale with every server you add.
Actual pricing for a 10-server fleet (publicly listed, March 2026)
PodWarden
Unlimited servers on every plan. Multi-cluster, GPU placement, secrets, backups, deployment history, DDNS, HTTPS, AI/MCP — all included.
Portainer Business (Starter)
Per-node pricing. Free for 3 nodes, then $14–17/node/mo (Starter) or $31–33/node/mo (Scale). vCPU caps per node (16 or 24). No GPU scheduling, no built-in backups, no DDNS.
Portainer Business (Scale)
Same per-node model but with 24 vCPU/node cap and 9x5 SLA support. Required for nodes with more than 16 vCPUs.
SUSE Rancher Prime
Per-core pricing since 2025. Bare metal: ~$7,300/server/yr (Standard). AWS Marketplace: $450/node/mo. Community edition is free but has no SLA, no compliance certs, no hardened images.
Red Hat OpenShift
Per-core-pair pricing (~$477/yr per 2 cores). A 10-node cluster with 16-core CPUs costs ~$38k/yr (Standard). With 32-core CPUs: ~$76k/yr. Organizations report 300–500% increases at renewal.
Self-hosted PaaS (Coolify, CapRover, Dokku)
Free and open source. Great for single-server web app deployments. No multi-cluster, limited or no GPU support, no fleet-wide operations, no secrets management, no network awareness.
Prices from public pricing pages and reseller listings. Enterprise tiers with custom pricing not shown.
Need PodWarden at scale?
For organizations managing large fleets, the Enterprise plan includes things that smaller teams don't need but larger operations can't live without.
On-premise control plane
Run PodWarden Cloud inside your own network. No data leaves your infrastructure. Full air-gap support.
Managed operations
We don't just give you the tool — we help you operate it. Fleet setup, migration assistance, ongoing guidance from our engineering team.
Compliance & security
Audit logs, SSO enforcement, security review documentation. What your compliance team needs to sign off.
Custom integrations
Priority roadmap input, custom API integrations, and dedicated engineering support for your specific deployment requirements.
Common questions
Is the free tier actually free, or is it a trial?
Actually free. No credit card, no time limit, no “first 14 days” trick. Unlimited servers, all core features, forever. We mean it.
What happens if I add 50 servers on the free plan?
It works. There are no server limits on any plan. Add 5 servers or 500 — PodWarden manages them all. The paid plans add team collaboration, cloud features, and image caching. The core fleet management is free for everyone.
How do DDNS subdomains work?
When you connect to Hub, you can allocate a subdomain like swift17.vxloc.com. PodWarden detects your public IP every 5 minutes and automatically updates the DNS record via Cloudflare. Your gateway node runs Caddy, which handles HTTPS via Let's Encrypt. Free tier gets 1 subdomain with auto-generated names. Pro and above get multiple subdomains with custom slugs. Business and Enterprise can bring their own domains.
What's the image registry cache?
Docker images can disappear. Maintainers delete tags, Docker Hub enforces pull rate limits, registries go down. The image registry cache stores copies of the container images your templates use, so your deployments aren't dependent on third-party uptime. Pro gets 50 GB, Business gets 500 GB, Enterprise gets unlimited.
What does “per organization” mean?
One price covers your entire organization. Not per user, not per server, not per cluster. One organization, one bill. The plan limits apply to team member count and cluster count, not servers or deployments.
Do you offer SLAs?
PodWarden runs on your infrastructure, not ours. We can't guarantee uptime for servers and networks we don't control. What we can guarantee is that we respond fast and do our best to help. Enterprise customers get a dedicated account manager and direct access to our engineering team.
Can I switch plans anytime?
Yes. Upgrade or downgrade at any time. If you downgrade, you keep access to paid features until the end of your billing period. No contracts, no cancellation fees.
What if I want to stop using PodWarden?
Your clusters are standard K3s. Your templates are Docker containers, not a proprietary format. Uninstall PodWarden and your infrastructure keeps running. You can migrate to kubectl, ArgoCD, Flux, or any Kubernetes tooling — the clusters are already there.
Where are my secrets stored?
On your PodWarden instance, encrypted at rest with AES-256. The encryption key lives on your infrastructure, not ours. If you use the free tier, your secrets never leave your network.
What happens if PodWarden Cloud goes down?
Your running infrastructure is unaffected. PodWarden Cloud provides the catalog, fleet API, and image cache. Your local PodWarden instances operate independently — deployments, secrets, and monitoring all continue working.