Terraform Cloud Pricing Revealed

TL;DR: No, I won't contact sales.

Quick Pricing Summary

The Resource Pricing Model

Here's the thing about resources: everything counts.

Your AWS security group? That's 1 resource. Each rule in that security group? Another resource. Got 10 rules? You're paying for 11 resources total.

Standard tier math:

• 1,000 resources = $122/year
• 10,000 resources = $950/month
• 18,500 resources = $1,790/month

But wait. If you have dev, staging, and production environments with identical infrastructure, multiply that by 3. That 600-resource production setup becomes 1,800 resources across environments, jumping from $122 to $850 per year.

What AWS and Azure Marketplace Tell Us

AWS Marketplace lists Terraform Enterprise at $15,000/year for 5 workspaces. Need 200 workspaces? That's custom pricing territory. Same deal on Azure.

The marketplace pricing gives you:

• $15,000/year (12 months)
• $30,000 for 24 months
• $45,000 for 36 months

Bronze support only. Silver or Gold? Contact sales.

Real Customer Examples

A LinkedIn post by Mattias Fjellström documents a Reddit user with 20,000 resources who jumped from $260/month to $1,900/month after the June 2023 pricing change. The user noted they were "looking to move to another cloud platform" because of this 7.3x increase.

This Reddit discussion mentions a GitHub organization with over 900 repos that provision from Terraform, each with around 10 unique labels, GitHub teams, and associations between repos — costing approximately $860/month or $10,280/year.

HashiCorp's own discussion forum shows an infrastructure team member calculating that managing 10,000 resources would cost approximately $1,000 per month, noting that "10,000 resources may only cover around 50 accounts" while they're responsible for hundreds.

Vendr's data shows the average Terraform Enterprise deal at $37,000/year, but they've seen contracts up to $300,000.

The Standard Tier Gotchas

Standard tier sounds reasonable until you hit the limits:

• Only 5 policies allowed
• Just 1 can be hard-mandatory
• No team management
• No SSO

Need proper governance? That's a $75,000/year upgrade to Plus tier. No middle ground.

Migration Patterns

The pricing changes triggered an exodus. Common destinations:

Scalr: $.99/run, everything included on a single plan, unlimited concurrency

Spacelift: $399/month for 10 users, bills by concurrency not resources or usage

Self-hosted: Atlantis or manual GitOps workflows (though Cloud Posse documented spending 2 months reconciling infrastructure drift when helping a customer migrate from Atlantis to a managed platform).

This DEV Community post compiled migration resources, noting that "Terraform Automation & Collaboration Software (TACOS) like Spacelift, Scalr, and Env0 provide a framework for solving the problems with operating IaC at scale."

Enterprise Reality Check

Based on marketplace data and user reports:

• Small enterprise (50-100 workspaces): $75,000-$100,000/year
• Medium enterprise (200-500 workspaces): $150,000-$200,000/year
• Large enterprise (500+ workspaces): $200,000-$300,000/year

Renewal increases of 300-600% are common. That $80/month deal you negotiated two years ago? Expect a quote for $20,000+/year at renewal. Vendr's data shows average enterprise deals at $37,000/year.

Should You Use Terraform Cloud?

Free tier works great for:

• Personal projects under 500 resources
• Small teams with simple infrastructure
• Proof of concepts

Consider alternatives if you:

• Manage over 5,000 resources
• Need predictable costs
• Run ephemeral environments
• Require enterprise features without enterprise budget

The Concurrency Problem That Changes Everything

Here's what nobody talks about until it's too late: Terraform Cloud's concurrent run limits.

The hard limits:

• Free tier: 1 concurrent run
• Standard tier: 3 concurrent runs
• Plus tier ($75K/year): 10 concurrent runs maximum
• Enterprise: Still just 10 unless you deploy self-hosted agents

Scalr documented a customer with 355 hours of cumulative wait time across runs. After migrating, their wait time dropped to 0.14 milliseconds. That's not a typo.

Another team reported their CI/CD pipeline expanding from 5 minutes to 35 minutes as they scaled. During incidents - exactly when you need speed - you're "throttled by the concurrency limits," as one user put it.

How Terraform Cloud competitors handle concurrency:

• Env0: Unlimited concurrent runs at all paid tiers
• Scalr: 5 standard, scales automatically based on usage
• Spacelift: Worker-based model, add workers as needed

The workarounds are desperate: teams split monolithic configs into tiny workspaces, schedule deployments at 3 AM, or maintain hybrid environments. Most just migrate.

The Bottom Line

Terraform Cloud's pricing model rewards small, static infrastructures and penalizes dynamic, scaled environments. But the concurrency limits might kill your productivity before the pricing does.

The lack of a mid-tier option between Standard ($0-$2,000/month) and Plus ($6,250/month minimum) forces growing teams into expensive decisions. When you factor in the 10-run concurrency cap even at Plus tier, the platform becomes untenable for modern DevOps practices.

If you're managing real infrastructure at scale, budget $75,000/year minimum for Plus tier. For Enterprise features, start at $150,000/year and expect to negotiate up from there based on your resource count and workspace needs. And even then, you're still capped at 10 concurrent runs unless you deploy self-hosted agents.

The days of affordable Terraform Cloud for mid-size teams are over. Plan accordingly.