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Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

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Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#3

Post by foolfoolz »

they are copying the pulumi pricing which is insanely expensive as well. i don’t blame these companies for trying to make money but it’s one thing to codify the infrastructure. it’s another thing to pay for infrastructure as a service (on top of your iaas cloud)

i think there’s only 2 paths forward: host your own (short term) and cloud providers will offer this for free / lower cost (long term)

i think google and aws and the others will be strong at this in 5 years and will direct customers to iac more than clicking through a website. or simply offer better tools. the iac solutions today are just bandaids on poor user experiences in bigger products

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#4

Post by api »

ZIRP is over and SaaS is entrenched. Prepare for a LOT more rug pulling and price gouging.

The labor and capital cost savings for moving to the cloud and SaaS were to get you there and get you dependent. Now that you don’t have in house IT anymore it’s time to turn the screws. You will soon be paying 2-3X what self hosted internal IT cost.

The the pendulum will start to swing the other way. This is one of those endless cycles in software and IT. Get ready for Harvard Business Review articles about how much someone saved exiting cloud.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#5

Post by jakozaur »

Hashicorp is one of the extreme examples. Terraform Cloud is an okay product at best, which went from expensive to very expensive. Moreover, they aggressively changed the Terraform license from open-source to BSL.

So after the whole community contributed a lot of providers, they want to profit from that.

You should use OpenTofu and buy IAC from one of the companies sponsoring full-time engineers on that project: Spacelift, env0, Harness or Scalr.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#6

Post by saberience »

Terraform Cloud costs are an absolute joke. I was actually the decision maker a couple of years ago when we chose our IAC stack and decided not to go with Terraform Cloud despite thinking the product is strong, and it was entirely due to the business model and cost.

For us (and I'm guessing for many VC funded companies), SAAS managed IAC is a nice to have, but certainly not a MUST-have and certainly not something in the same "willing to spend money range" as your monitoring or your main cloud hosting costs.

I see these kind of tools as a tier below your monitoring tools like DataDog/Splunk etc. And these tools are a tier below your AWS/GCP costs. If your IAC or CI costs are approaching or overtaking your monitoring costs, something weird is afoot. Likewise, if your Datadog costs are approaching your AWS bill, this is obviously wrong.

Hashicorp, in my opinion, thinks their tool is more mission-critical and more of a value-add than in reality it actually is, and I think they also don't understand that in the current high interest rate environment, companies are FAR more willing to put in engineering time to do migrations or money saving projects. My own company put in 100s of hours of Engineering time to reduce the Datadog bill by roughly 40-50%.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#8

Post by _joel »

jakozaur wrote: post #5

Hashicorp is one of the extreme examples. Terraform Cloud is an okay product at best, which went from expensive to very expensive. Moreover, they aggressively changed the Terraform license from open-source to BSL. So after the whole community contributed a lot of providers, they want to profit from that. You should use OpenTofu and buy IAC from one of the companies sponsoring full-time engineers on that project: Spac…

I would use opentofu but still waiting on cdktf https://github.com/opentofu/manifesto/issues/58

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#9

Post by mathverse »

saberience wrote: post #6

Terraform Cloud costs are an absolute joke. I was actually the decision maker a couple of years ago when we chose our IAC stack and decided not to go with Terraform Cloud despite thinking the product is strong, and it was entirely due to the business model and cost. For us (and I'm guessing for many VC funded companies), SAAS managed IAC is a nice to have, but certainly not a MUST-have and certainly not something in…

I think Terraform Cloud (and most Hashi's enterprise offerings) aim at absolutel behemoths of deployments with many, many infra teams where the complexity comes from scale and the companies are not Google or Facebook and therefore this problem can't be solved through talent. For many such enterprises it's easier to throw money at the problem.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#10

Post by nprateem »

saberience wrote: post #6

Terraform Cloud costs are an absolute joke. I was actually the decision maker a couple of years ago when we chose our IAC stack and decided not to go with Terraform Cloud despite thinking the product is strong, and it was entirely due to the business model and cost. For us (and I'm guessing for many VC funded companies), SAAS managed IAC is a nice to have, but certainly not a MUST-have and certainly not something in…

It is mission critical, just not the SaaS version.
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