The EKS capability for Argo CD costs $0.03 an hour plus $0.0015 an hour per Argo CD Application: about $22 a month, plus about $1.10 per application. Argo CD runs in AWS's control plane, not on your nodes, with Identity Center sign-in. What it costs at 20, 100 and 500 applications, and when self-hosting still makes sense.
Amazon EKS now offers Argo CD as a managed "capability". AWS runs Argo CD in its own control plane, so the controllers don't live on your worker nodes and your nodes don't need access to Git or Helm registries. AWS handles scaling and patching, and the Argo CD UI signs people in through IAM Identity Center, with groups mapped to Argo CD roles.
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There is no free tier and no commitment. The EKS cluster fee ($0.10 an hour on standard support) is separate. AWS's own example is $131.40 a month for 100 applications. Note that it counts Application resources, so an ApplicationSet that generates one Application per cluster multiplies the bill by the number of clusters.
Self-hosted Argo CD is free software, but it isn't free to run: a few pods on nodes you pay for, upgrades every few months, and someone who knows what to do when the repo server runs out of memory. For a startup with a few dozen applications, $40–$60 a month is usually less than an engineer's hour on that work.
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As of November 2, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.