Google are (were) not the only ones offering this free control plane model, though. My DigitalOcean DOk8s managed tend toward unstable if they are used with too small of node pools. (I don't know why that is, but it seems like a good way to make sure I pay attention to the workloads and also spend at least $20/mo for each cluster I run with them.)

It will be interesting in any case to see if DigitalOcean and Azure are going to follow suit! I'd be very surprised if they do, (but I've also been wrong before, recently too.)