Quick take
Manual tagging breaks at scale. Devs forget labels, tags drift across rebuilds, and 30 to 40% of your cluster cost ends up unallocated. Kubernetes already exposes five attribution signals for free. Use them, and most teams can drop manual tagging entirely.
If you only have 90 seconds, this is the shape:
Namespace, owner reference, ServiceAccount, image path, and node label are the five signals K8s gives you with no tagging effort.
OpenCost and Kubecost already read them. The trick is to stop overriding them with brittle manual labels.
