They don't necessarily bill by the RAM, but definitely network and disk I/O, which are also magnified quite significantly. Especially considering you require redundancy/HA when dealing with the distributed computing
(because of that ol' fly in the ointment
r n-r n!
p (1-p) -------
r!(n-r)!
)> My k3s with a dozen of pods fits in couple gigs.
My Kibana instance alone could be characterized as "a couple of gigs". Though I produce quite a lot of logs. Although that is not a problem with logrotate and grep.