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Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

shavingtheyak.com

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Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#81
post #36
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…

In all fairness, the Terraform provider registry has always been clearly proprietary, prohibiting commercial use by default: > You may download or copy the Content (and other items displayed on the Services for download) for personal non-commercial use only https://web.archive.org/web/20201106225027/https://registry....

I listened to a changelog.com podcast the other day on the subject of OpenTofu (It was a few months old so they were still calling it OpenTF).

Apparently a lot of the actual images are hosted on the GitHub container registry (ghcr.io), and in many cases, the Terraform registry is just passing the request through to download an image from a repo that may be owned by someone else.

So in effect, they're putting scary licensing text on a lot of content they have no control over.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#82
Now we have to pay for every single GitHub issue label, for every single Terrarform Workspace tag, etc., which we manage with Terraform. Basically, their pricing forces people to do more stuff outside of Terraform and incentivices ClickOps. I'm no longer going to use TFC as there are plenty of open-source alternatives! We have no choice but to pay this year although we're looking to get rid of TFC and evaluating competitors. I don't like their TFC Stacks feature, which is also patent-pending. They limit Terraform so that you must pay to get your problems solved with TFC. It's a nasty scheme that will cost them dearly! They are like Docker as a company. Vault now has a bunch of competition as well.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never really swings back the other way. It slows down adoption but we’ll never see large back-in-house IT projects. Because in-house offerings (and open-source) aren’t up to the task anymore.

In-house IT isn't up to the task of building systems that are infinitely scalable but as the price goes up lots and lots of shops are going to realize they don't need infinitely scalable, they need the scale they're at and have no reason to want to grow it. In-house IT is great at that.

I feel like people also haven’t updated their mental models from 20 years ago about what a small server can do.

A Raspberry Pi 5 has more power than a huge NT back office server in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

The cloud hid 20 years of progress more or less. Things got more powerful but cloud prices didn’t come down at the same rate. Cloud providers pocketed the difference.

The void for on prem is mostly in the software. There just aren’t good management solutions or modern devops stacks for it. The hardware is way more than adequate. It’s also a lot more reliable than it used to be. Spinning disk is dead unless you are warehousing massive amounts of data.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#84

I’ve loved using Hashicorp products for many years but I have (despite often being in a position to do so) failed miserably to engage in any kind of commercial relationship with them. Their pricing has always been opaque. Despite trying my hardest, even multiple phone calls with their sales teams, I never got even a sniff of how much it would cost for enterprise deployments of Hashicorp products at any of my clients.…

They tried to sell 100k/y minimum licenses is what I’ve seen so probably just disqualified you early in their sales process

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#85
post #70
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it seems to be a well-written article It's LLM-assisted/bloated fluff which it pretty much admits (with some more LLM-y fluff) right at the start https://shavingtheyak.com/2023/10/29/seo-generative-ai-and-t...

The article you linked doesn't admit that at all. > I will use generative AI for ‘color’ content like pictures and icons due to factors like cost and time, but I don’t intend to use AI for anything else at all other than possibly helping me sort through ideas or summarizing pertinent information from overly long articles. TFA doesn't read like ChatGPT nonsense and it provides some interesting discussion. It looks lik…

Read the linked post, it's completely generic and repetitive and 'possibly helping me sort through ideas' is doing a lot of lifting that the author obviously isn't.

If you look around right now, it seems generative AI is all the rage. There is a growing pool of people now out there who:

[bulleted list]

Lets think about what generative AI can do right now and what this could mean for web content and organically generated search traffic going forward:

Right now, generative AI can:

[bulleted list]

Lets take a look at the web for a second. Websites are what? Text. Images. Sometimes videos or music and sounds. Sometimes websites are dynamic and interactive, like web applications. All of these things can and will be created using generative AI. The use of generative AI to save time creating these things will increase exponentially over time.

This is original writing the way trying to meet the word or page count for your middle school homework is original writing.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is concurrency in this sense mostly just 'how many terraform plan/apply runs you have going at once?' Also, is the Enterprise plan significantly more expensive than the cloud plan?

> Is concurrency in this sense mostly just 'how many terraform plan/apply runs you have going at once?' Yes, though not by minute, but by "max concurrency" over a month, with some room for bursts. > Also, is the Enterprise plan significantly more expensive than the cloud plan? It's quite a bit more expensive. I do recommend contacting our sales team[0] and presenting your use-case, though, to get more details. You ca…

Thanks! Feels like most of the time I fall right in the horrible spot of basically 'very small enterprise'. I need some enterprise features, but will never be able to get funding for the enterprise version.

Thanks!

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#89
post #27

All these companies saw Snowflake's success and thought, "we want to use some kind of usage based pricing scheme to capture the value that we provide". Implicit in this thought process is that the price should scale in an unbounded way - if you're providing X value for a company with 10M revenue, you should be providing roughtly 1000X value to a company with 10B revenue. And it may be true that you are providing 1000…

That's the biggest challenge - you can't capture all the value that you're providing your clients, otherwise there's 0 reason to use your product over either

1. Building it inhouse

2. Using someone who is capturing Then the only "moat" you have is lock-in, but clients tend to not like that, and you're squandering your reputational capital.

Re: Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock

#90

I’ve loved using Hashicorp products for many years but I have (despite often being in a position to do so) failed miserably to engage in any kind of commercial relationship with them. Their pricing has always been opaque. Despite trying my hardest, even multiple phone calls with their sales teams, I never got even a sniff of how much it would cost for enterprise deployments of Hashicorp products at any of my clients.…

* Gross margin: 80% (hey this one is pretty good) * Operating margin: -62% * Net margin: -57% * Return on Equity: -22% * Return on Invested Capital: -21%

Their sales and marketing is pretty bloated and is destroying all of their gross profit alone.

Their stock seems to be priced on the hopes and dreams that they'll grow revenue out of their current problems before they run out of cash. But the headline and the reactions here show how they're trying to do that.

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