The new Terraform Cloud pricing model is so expensive! Or is it?
Mattias Fjellstr?m
??♂? @ Accelerate at Iver | Author | HashiCorp Ambassador | HashiCorp User Group Leader
Terraform Cloud recently presented a new pricing model. Previously you paid $20 per user per month, for the?team tier. Now you pay $0.00014 per managed resource per hour. Initially it is difficult to say if this is better or worse for you and your current environment.
Before we dig into the answer, lets first stop and appreciate two important points:
Let’s move back to the topic of pricing. If the new pricing model is expensive or not depends on how many resources you are currently deploying through Terraform Cloud, and how many users you currently have in your Terraform Cloud environment.
The table below illustrates the situation nicely. On the x-axis (left-right) we have the number of active users, and on the y-axis (up-down) we have the number of resources. The number in the table is the?price per user per month. A green box means we pay less than what we previously paid, a red box means we pay more than we previously paid. A white box simply means we pay an equal amount. Take a look:
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Let us imagine two different possible scenarios:
Note again that the first 500 resources are free! So in the first scenario above we are really talking about 3500 resources, and in the second example we are talking about 3100 resources.
Which scenario is most common? In my personal experience scenario two is more common, but more reasonably there would be?more users?and?less resources?than what that scenario has. The first scenario might be common, but if you find yourself in that scenario you should ask yourself why that is. Maybe it is high time to onboard additional users into your Terraform Cloud environment?
Let me know what you think!
Director of Data Operations and Warehousing at Mutual of Enumclaw
1 年Great article Mattias F. your observations are the same as what I have seen. Unfortunately for over half of Hashicorp's customers, this means they are going pay more and in some cases astronomically more. For instance, not everyone is using the predominant providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. In those scenarios it's likely that the quantity of resources is quite manageable and is still cost prohibitive even though it's a little higher. In our case we are using another provider (Snowflake-Labs/Snowflake) that requires a high quantity of resources. We are on the initial Teams plan that was available a couple years ago and paying $260 per month for 8 users. We are running about 20k managed resources. Your chart doesn't go that high but I can tell you that the cost went from $260 per month to about $1900 per month. We are looking to move to another cloud platform for our Terraform needs because of this. What seems to be clear to me is that Hashicorp let someone (maybe marketing) that doesn't have a realistic grasp on how Terraform is being used industry wide come up with a pricing model that has nothing to do with the actual run rate and cost incurred by Hashicorp per run.
Devops Consultant at Coforge | Ex-Amdocs | Ex-Ericsson | Tech Enthusiast | Certified Kubernetes Administrator & AWS Associate Solution Architect, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker Container, IaaC, CI-CD, Shell/Python Scripting
1 年Thanks for this lovely explaining chart. what i can see from this chart is as long your avg resources / user are 200 you are paying the same ( infact lower since you have 500 free resources additionally). Anything below 200 resources is a WIN and more than 200 resources /User is LOSE. Also i believe in startup companies Scenario-1 is more likely to be prominent while in bigger organizations Scenario-2 is more likely. Appears to be a good pay-per-use model to me as a user.
Software architect and entrepreneur
1 年Mattias Fjellstr?m you haven't accounted for the total cost. At 3000 resources, $151/mo/user x 2 users = $302/mo. At 2600 resources, $17/mo/user x 15 users = $255/mo, not a big savings. And if you use 3000 resources in both cases (not sure why you'd show fewer resources in a bigger team -- I'd think more often the opposite would be true), the second scenario is $20/mo/user x 15 users = $300/mo. That's only $2 less than scenario 1. I don't know what you set out to show here, but the two scenarios are a wash when it comes to total dollars.
AI | DevOps | Security | Open Source | #hackpro_sako #everyballwins
1 年??
??♂? @ Accelerate at Iver | Author | HashiCorp Ambassador | HashiCorp User Group Leader
1 年... and as always you can enjoy this article in a nice blue rendition on my blog: https://mattias.engineer/posts/terraform-cloud-pricing/