We had such an amazing year 2025 and our commercial offering is gaining a ton of traction with large enterprises, neoclouds and AI factories alike. We doubled our team size and almost tripled our revenue in 2025. This success is rooted in our strong open source project and in our vCluster community, so to kick off 2026, we wanted to make sure to give back to our strongest supporters in the community and we thought hard about how to do this. The result of this are two additions to vCluster that we’ve been working on over the past few months and we’re announcing both of them today:

vind - vCluster in Docker (100% open source, no strings attached) 1.

vCluster Free - Our New Free Tier (makes many Enterprise feature available for free)

To learn more about vind, check out our livestream today on Youtube or LinkedIn. To learn more about vCluster Free, we will run a separate livestream next week (Youtube, LinkedIn) but of course, we’ll show some of it off today. For details about vind and vCluster Free outside of these livestreams, keep reading.

What is vCluster Free?

vCluster Free gives anyone access to many of our enterprise features at no cost. The following features are included in this free tier:

CRD Sync

Sync Patches

Namespace 1:1 Syncing

Custom DNS Entries

Embedded etcd

Private Nodes

Auto Nodes

Standalone

vCluster Platform core features enabling self-service: Templates, CRDs, User Management, RBAC, etc.

It’s quite a long list, isn’t it? All of these features were previously part of our Enterprise plan, but now you can use them for free.

Why not open source?

We’re an open source company deeply committed to ensuring that vCluster thrives as an open source project. To ensure this long-term, we need to build a successful business around it. That’s the best way to make open source sustainable.

If we open sourced all of the features above, many enterprises would build around the open source project instead of purchasing our commercial offering, which would make it difficult to sustain the business and continue investing in vCluster. This is already happening today—vCluster provides significant value and enables teams to build real platforms on top of the open source project. Even commercial vendors like SpectroCloud, Rafay, Taikun Cloud, Uffizzi, and others have integrated open source vCluster into their products.

There’s clearly a lot of value in vCluster open source. We’re continuing to add more features, including our announcement of vind today, which allows you to run vCluster in Docker similar to KinD—entirely available in our open source project. Join our livestream to learn more about vind. We will continue investing in our open source project and building features valuable to our open source community.

However, to make more of our enterprise features available to the community in a way that doesn’t cannibalize our Enterprise offering, enable competitors, or reduce large enterprises’ interest in our commercial offering, we decided to launch vCluster Free—an offering between vCluster Open Source and vCluster Enterprise. We designed this free tier to be actually useful and set the limits intentionally high so you can get significant value from it.

What are the limits of vCluster Free?

This free tier is not a trial but our attempt to make more enterprise features permanently available to the community. There is no time limit on how long you can use this free tier. Instead, it’s limited by infrastructure size:

Up to 64 vCPU cores

Up to 32 GPUs

As long as you stay below these numbers, you can use any of the features above and you get:

Unlimited Users

Unlimited Host Clusters

Unlimited Virtual Clusters (max 1 HA)

We wanted this free tier to be actually useful and enable anyone who loves vCluster to access more of the features we’re building for our enterprise customers.

What can I do with vCluster Free?

vCluster Free lets anyone use many of our most advanced vCluster Enterprise features without speaking to our sales team or providing a credit card. We believe the limits above are high enough to cover many use cases entirely. Such use cases include:

vCluster as dev environments in startups or R&D teams within larger orgs

Ephemeral CI environments for running e2e tests (especially for operators/CRDs)

Simulating cluster changes (upgrading platform components)

Running vendor software in a more isolated way (e.g., GitLab runners, etc.)

Ephemeral clusters for demos (product demos, conference talks, etc.)

Running a small production cluster

Home labs and personal test environments

There are probably many more use cases. Many of them can already be addressed by our open source project, but with the new vCluster Free offering, you get access to even more functionality, a great UI, plus all the CRDs and controllers that come with vCluster Platform.

I hope you enjoy this new offering. You can try it today by signing up for vCluster Cloud or spinning up vCluster Platform using any of the commands below:

# Run in Docker (for local testing)
vcluster platform start --docker

# Run in Kubernetes
vcluster platform start

We’re excited to see what you build with vCluster Free.

Upcoming Livestream: Unlocking Enterprise Features with vCluster Free

Join us for an exclusive live session on February 9th at 9 am PT, where we dive deep into vCluster Free and show you how to get started.

In this session, you’ll discover:

What’s new in vCluster Free: Explore the enterprise features now available at no cost, including CRD Sync, Sync Patches, embedded etcd, and vCluster Platform core features

**Live demonstrations: **Watch us deploy and configure virtual clusters using vCluster Free, including hands-on examples with Templates, RBAC, and self-service features

Understanding the limits: Get clarity on the 64 vCPU and 32 GPU limits and how they apply to your infrastructure

Q&A session: Ask our engineering team anything about vCluster Free, deployment strategies, or vCluster Platform

**Register: Youtube | **LinkedIn