AKS 6 is the only one of the three whose control plane can cost nothing for any number of clusters. Its three pricing tiers differ only in cluster management; nodes, disks and load balancers cost the same in each:
Free: no control-plane charge and no financially backed SLA; recommended for fewer than 10 nodes.
Standard: $0.10 per cluster-hour, an API server SLA of 99.95% across availability zones (99.9% without), and up to 5,000 nodes.
Premium: $0.60 per cluster-hour, Standard plus Long-Term Support, a second year of patches per minor.
AKS Automatic, the managed-node mode comparable to Autopilot, always uses the Standard tier. AKS supports three GA minors, each for 12 months: on 26 September 2026 those are 1.36 (GA June 2026, supported to June 2027), 1.35 and 1.34, with 1.37 in preview and GA planned for October. New clusters default to the second-newest minor.
az group create --name booknest-rg --location eastus
az aks create --resource-group booknest-rg --name booknest --tier free \
--node-count 2 --generate-ssh-keys
az aks get-credentials --resource-group booknest-rg --name booknest
az aks update --resource-group booknest-rg --name booknest --tier standardThe tier is a switch, not a rebuild: learn and test for free, and pay for the SLA the day real customers arrive.