Every category where a model named Kubecost for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Cloud cost management	Cloud and infrastructure	0%	16 of 79	0%	24	accepted challenger

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for Kubecost yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated Kubecost across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	Alternative	Mention	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	1	0	1
GPT-5.4 mini	1	0	1
Gemini 3.5 Flash	2	0	2
Perplexity Sonar	1	0	1
Grok 4.1 Fast	2	0	2
Mistral Small	0	2	2
DeepSeek V4 Flash	1	2	3
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	1
Qwen 3.7 Flash	1	1	2
Kimi K2	3	2	5
GLM 4.7 FlashX	2	0	2
MiniMax M2.5	0	2	2

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct10 labelsNone

Paraphrase6 labels1

Comparative25 labelsNone

Budget-constrained8 labelsNone

Scale-constrained13 labelsNone

Negative12 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative74 labels in all, every segment counted; 1 of the 1 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

“Kubecost offers a highly popular free tier that allows you to monitor cost allocation on a single cluster” Gemini 3.5 Flash · FinOps · budget prompt · alternative

“widely considered the standard for visualizing *where* resources are being consumed in a cluster” Qwen 3.7 Flash · FinOps · comparative prompt · alternative

“Open-source options (OpenCost, KubeCost community edition) for Kubernetes-specific needs” Kimi K2 · FinOps · negative prompt · alternative

“Kubecost (open core) | Kubernetes cost deep-dive | Free/paid tiers | K8s dominant” Grok 4.1 Fast · FinOps · scale prompt · alternative

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

No model argued against it.

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as Kubecost, over the 74 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and Kubecost was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Vantage56 of 7428Not in the top three

IBM Apptio Cloudability50 of 747Not in the top three

CloudZero44 of 747Not in the top three

VMware Tanzu CloudHealth42 of 742Not in the top three

AWS Cost Explorer38 of 7410Not in the top three

Microsoft Cost Management35 of 746Not in the top three

CAST AI33 of 740Not in the top three

ProsperOps29 of 740Not in the top three

Infracost26 of 741Not in the top three

Flexera One23 of 741Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named Kubecost. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 55 of the 74 answers that named Kubecost and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

cloudzero.com40

cloudaware.com39

gartner.com29

amnic.com25

usage.ai25

nops.io22

learn.g2.com21

spendark.com20

vantage.sh20

finout.io15

256 of the 256 domain citations in answers naming Kubecost came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

cloudzero.com/blog/cloud-cost-management-tools33

cloudaware.com/blog/cloud-cost-management-tools31

gartner.com/reviews/market/cloud-financial-management-tools29

usage.ai/blogs/finops/tools/best-tools22

learn.g2.com/best-cloud-cost-management-software21

nops.io/blog/cloud-cost-management-software-tools19

amnic.com/blogs/cloud-cost-management-tools18

newrelic.com/blog/observability/best-cloud-cost-management-tools15

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Names read as Kubecost

What the judge wrote, as written, with how often. The vendor table decides that these count as Kubecost; a claim can dispute any of them.

KubeCost 1Kubecost (by IBM) 1Kubecost (now IBM) 1Kubecost (now IBM) / OpenCost 1Kubecost Free 1

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when Kubecost's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as Kubecost, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at kubecost.com is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.