For years, we’ve talked about FinOps as “the practice of optimizing cloud costs.” But in 2025, it’s no longer just about saving money: FinOps is now an economic observability layer. And when working with Kubernetes clusters—microservices, ephemeral pods, autoscaling, and workloads that change every minute—having this visibility is almost mandatory.
One tool that continues to set the standard in this space is OpenCost, an open-source project backed by the FinOps Foundation and CNCF (recently promoted to Incubation), which allows you to see how much each pod, namespace, or service in your cluster costs, in real time.
What is OpenCost and Why It Still Matters
OpenCost was born to solve a specific problem: Kubernetes costs were a black hole.
In 2025, the project has matured significantly—it now has stable integrations with AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-prem Kubernetes—and boasts an active community that includes Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Adobe.
Today, OpenCost offers: 
Cost calculations by namespace, label, or deployment Integration with Prometheus, Grafana, and cloud providers to bring in real pricing data Custom pricing definitions for hybrid environments Exportable metrics for dashboards or FinOps pipelines Plugins for Datadog, MongoDB Atlas, and even OpenAI
Quick Installation (Kubernetes)
# Add Helm repository
helm repo add opencost https://opencost.github.io/opencost-helm-chart
# Install OpenCost
helm install opencost opencost/opencost \
-n opencost --create-namespace
# Access the dashboard
kubectl port-forward --namespace opencost \
service/opencost 9090:9090
Dashboard available at: http://localhost:9090
Conclusion
OpenCost is an excellent starting point: open-source, certified by the FinOps Foundation, backed by CNCF, and supported by an active community.
If you’re already using Kubernetes, don’t wait until quarter-end to understand your bill. Measure, optimize, and share these insights with your team today.