I would guess "up to" means once these costs you mention are amortized. Sure k8s isn't going to beat a $10 dyno or however much they cost now, but I bet a clust

I would guess "up to" means once these costs you mention are amortized. Sure k8s isn't going to beat a $10 dyno or however much they cost now, but I bet a cluster of 10 large VMs each running 50 containers blows the equivalent Heroku setup out of the water on costs. K8s basically gets cheaper the more you run (as cloud costs, setup costs, engineering, bin-packing, volume discounts stack up), whereas Heroku basically scales linearly.