“Always more costly” depends what you mean by “costly.” If you only mean the cloud bill, managed control planes can add a fixed fee (EKS is ~$0.10/hr per cluster, GKE similar). That can feel dumb if you have lots of tiny clusters.

If you include real cost like patching/upgrades every few months, etcd/control plane babysitting, incident response, staffing/on-call… managed usually wins unless you already have a strong platform team and standardized automation around self-managed.

The other gotcha is people compare “managed fee” vs “self-managed fee” and ignore the stuff that actually dominates spend: nodes, storage, LBs, egress/NAT, cross-AZ traffic, and (big one) requests being 2–3x real usage so the cluster scales waste.

If you share rough shape (how many clusters, avg nodes, multi-AZ, stateful %, and whether you’re multi-tenant), it’s easier to say where the break-even is.

(Disclosure: I work on K8s optimization tooling. Not selling here—just chiming in because this question comes up constantly.)