Scalr vs Terraform Cloud Pricing (2026)

In recent months there have been a lot of changes at Hashicorp, one being the BSL license change, but before that, there was an update to the Terraform Cloud pricing model. In previous versions of their pricing model, they charged by the number of users, per apply and also had different tiers for various features. In June of 2023, HashiCorp switched to the new pricing model which calculates the total cost through "resources under management" (rum pricing model) which charges customers for any resource that is deployed and then managed in Terraform state files by Terraform Cloud. In this blog, we will discuss the differences between the pricing models of Terraform Cloud and Scalr, a Terraform Cloud alternative.

Tiers/ Pricing Plans

Scalr

Scalr has three plans: Free, Business, and Enterprise.

The Free plan can be used for free up to 50 runs per month. On the first of every month, the quota resets, and customers get another set of 50 runs. Free-plan accounts start at two concurrent runs on the Scalr-managed runner pool and community support, with quotas right-sized for individual practitioners and small projects. The starting concurrency is a fraud-and-abuse control, not a paid feature, and is raised free of charge on request for any legitimate use case. Customers can also deploy as many self-hosted agents as they want; each agent automatically adds five concurrent runs (a per-agent ratio chosen to keep run execution reliable).

The Business plan is for organizations that need more than 50 runs per month. It covers the same core feature set as Free with generous run-resource quotas (5 concurrent runs to start on the Scalr-managed runner pool, raised free on request) and standard support; a trial is available. All objects in Scalr have quotas to avoid abuse, but on paid plans these quotas can be increased free of charge after a review of the use case, this includes concurrency. The Enterprise plan offers unlimited concurrency on the Scalr-managed pool and adds controls over data location, encryption keys, identity, and audit trail — plus dedicated capacity and enterprise contracts.

Terraform Cloud

HashiCorp now lists three public pricing tiers for HCP Terraform: Essentials, Standard, and Premium. A separate Enterprise offering covers Terraform Enterprise, the self-hosted version of the platform. The legacy self-serve free plan reached end of life on March 31, 2026, but an enhanced free tier continues (up to 500 managed resources, one concurrent run). The paid tiers are all priced on resources under management (RUM).

HCP Terraform's paid tiers are differentiated by which features are unlocked and by run/agent concurrency caps. The following capabilities are gated behind the higher tiers (and are all included on Scalr's free plan):

• Team management
• No code provisioning workflows
• Cross-Organization module sharing
• Drift detection
• Ephemeral workspaces
• Run metrics

The entry-level Essentials tier applies the RUM model to a basic feature set, with concurrency and policy/run-task integrations capped at low limits — usable only for small teams. OPA policy enforcement on the lower tiers is limited to a single policy set with one mandatory policy, and the run tasks feature is limited to one task integration.

The Standard tier opens up team management and an extra couple of concurrent runs but keeps the same policy and run-task limits.

To unlock the broader feature set — no-code provisioning workflows, audit logs, drift detection, ephemeral workspaces, unlimited OPA policy sets and enforcement levels, and unlimited run-task integrations — you need the Premium tier. As of June 2026 all three public tiers are priced per resource per month: Essentials $0.10, Standard $0.47, and Premium $0.99 (Premium is now publicly listed, not quote-only). Concurrency and self-hosted-agent limits rise with the tier.

The last tier that is listed on their pricing page is Terraform enterprise, which is their self-hosted option that is deployed entirely within an organization's network. Unfortunately, Hashicorp does not list the pricing model for the Terraform Enterprise offering, and users are required to contact the sales team. Through research, we have determined that the Terraform Enterprise pricing model is per Terraform workspace and does not seem to follow the same pricing structure as Terraform cloud.

Summary

At Scalr, we try to keep the pricing model as simple as possible and transparent. The ONLY factor that needs to be considered when looking at the free vs paid tier is if you will hit the 50-run limit on the free tier.

With HCP Terraform, every tier is paid and metered on resources under management, you have to pay extra to unlock core features as you move up tiers, and you also have to take into account limits on certain objects, like concurrency which is crucial for development cycles.

Terms

Scalr

Scalr has two term options: monthly or annual.

With the monthly plans, customers select a prepaid amount of runs they believe they will use in a month's time frame. The subscription can be upgraded or downgraded at any time based on the customer's usage. If a customer's usage goes beyond the pre-paid amount, a flex rate of $0.99 per run is charged until the next billing cycle begins. The more pre-paid runs that are purchased, the higher the volume discount is.

With the annual plans, customers can purchase runs in bulk and have one year from the purchase date to use the runs. The advantages of the annual plan are that customers do not have to predict month-to-month usage and a volume discount is applied to the total volume of runs purchased for the year. If customers use all of the runs before the end of the subscription period, they can renew early or pay for flex runs until the subscription is renewed.

All discounts for the monthly and annual subscriptions are included in the pricing calculator.

Terraform Cloud

Based on the information on the Terraform Cloud pricing page, it appears there is a pay-as-you-go or an annual subscription option.

Pay-as-you-go applies across the public tiers, priced per resource per month: Essentials $0.10, Standard $0.47, and Premium $0.99. The enhanced free tier covers the first 500 managed resources.

Annual commitments are available across the paid tiers. Terraform Enterprise (the self-hosted option) remains quote-based — its pricing is not published, so you must contact sales.

Summary

The Scalr pricing and terms are all laid out on the Scalr pricing page so that all customers understand what they are getting into before they even try the product. Customers are in full control of their terms, and the only thing that they commit to is a number of runs.

With Terraform Cloud, it is clear what is on the standard tier, but then beyond that, it appears to be unique per customer as you must contact the sales team.

What Factors Need to be Considered in the Pricing

Scalr

With Scalr, the ONLY thing that needs to be factored in is a run. There is no extra cost for support, new features, or increasing quotas on objects other than a run. It's also important to know that not all runs are counted against your Scalr bill. Our goal is to charge for runs that you get value out of, and we have several run results that you are not billed for based on error codes that can be seen here.

Terraform Cloud

With Terraform Cloud, we know that on the standard tier, you need to factor in the resources under management (RUM) by Terraform Cloud and that it is an hourly rate. You also need to understand which features you need within your organization as that plays a factor in which tier must be purchased. For example, if you want to have team management, you'll be forced to the plus tier and it is unclear how that is priced.

Support

Scalr

In Scalr, there are two support tiers: free and paid. The free tier has ticket-based and best-effort support. The paid tier has 24x7x365 support with different response times based on the ticket priority. Customers have access to the Scalr support portal, a Slack channel, as well as screen sharing software as needed. There is no extra cost for support on the paid tier.

Terraform Cloud

On the Terraform Cloud pricing page, it shows that the standard tier and above receive "enterprise support", but it is unclear if each tier receives the same level of support. There is a separate enterprise support page that lists bronze, silver, and gold support and it is unclear how much each costs or what tiers they are included in.

Estimate Scalr Cost

If you are currently a Terraform Cloud customer and looking for an alternative that is transparent and affordable, we have written a script that helps with your Scalr cost estimation. The script in this link will pull all of the runs you have ever executed in Terraform Cloud and then you can use the Scalr pricing calculator to estimate your total cost in Scalr. Keep in mind that the number of runs you are pulling from Terraform Cloud is for the lifetime of your account so you will have to do some prediction around monthly and annual usage.

Migrating to Scalr

Once you have worked through the cost estimation exercise and have made the decision to either stick with Terraform Cloud or migrate, we recommend reviewing the migration effort. The migration effort to Scalr is fairly low since Scalr is also a remote operations backend for Terraform. There are a few methods that can be used to perform the migration:

1. Use this Scalr module to automate the migration of objects from Terraform Cloud to Scalr
2. Pull down the state file using the Terraform CLI and then push the state into a workspace.
3. For larger organizations, it might be best to build the shell of Scalr first, being the environment structure, teams, etc, and then let the individual teams migrate by a specific date.

Find out more about the migration in this blog.

Pricing for other TACOs

Scalr and HCP Terraform are considered "TACOs", an acronym for "Terraform automation and collaboration software". In this section, we will highlight high-level pricing information for other relevant TACOs. The information below is accurate as of June 13th, 2026.

Atlantis

Atlantis is an open-source alternative to HCP Terraform. Therefore, there is no price associated with it other than the costs of maintaining the installation. Atlantis is targeted at GitOps users as it integrates directly with all major VCS providers.

Pricing Unit

Not applicable as Atlantis is open source.

Public Pricing

Not applicable as Atlantis is open source.

Env0

Env0 is a CICD platform for various infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, and Cloudformation.

Pricing Unit

For the higher tiers the pricing unit is per apply or per environment; the entry Cloud Compass tier is a flat monthly subscription.

Public Pricing

env0 publishes three paid tiers on its pricing page: Cloud Compass (entry, starting at $1,500/month), Cloud Navigator, and Cloud Pilot. There is no self-serve free plan — env0 offers a time-limited free trial only. As with most vendors in this space, higher tiers gate features such as SSO/SAML, self-hosted agents, advanced policy, and drift detection.

Only Cloud Compass has a list price published; Cloud Navigator and Cloud Pilot pricing requires contacting sales.

env0 spans several IaC tools, which is real breadth a Terraform-only platform lacks — but it comes with a tradeoff. env0 defines its core unit generically (an environment is "equivalent to a Terraform workspace or module"), its built-in dashboards are activity- and cost-centric, and its IaC-usage analytics live in Cloud Analyst, a paid AI add-on. If your estate is Terraform or OpenTofu only, a single-engine platform like Scalr can shape reports around Terraform's own objects — module usage, provider versions, resource rollups — rather than generalizing across tools.

Spacelift

Spacelift is a CICD platform for various infrastructure as code tools such as Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, Pulumi, and Cloudformation.

Pricing Unit

There are three paid plans, and each plan has different features and support levels associated with them.

Other than features, the pricing is based on "private workers", which are used to execute the deployments on. In other words, this is a concurrency-based pricing model: the pricing metric is parallel run slots, and the bill scales with the number of slots purchased.

Concurrency-based pricing has three structural problems compared with usage-based, per-run pricing. (1) The customer is always paying the wrong amount — buy too few slots and engineers queue during releases, buy too many and idle capacity is rented. There is no setting that's right. (2) It fails hardest exactly when you need it most: during an incident, parallel fixes queue behind the slot cap, and additional slots require procurement under pressure. (3) Capacity planning is offloaded to the buyer — forecasting peaks, monitoring utilization, engaging procurement to purchase additional slots as needs increase. Usage-based pricing avoids all three: the customer pays only for runs that actually executed, with no slot to mis-provision.

The enterprise plan must be purchased to use SSO / SAML 2.0.

Spacelift runs Terraform and OpenTofu as a mature, first-class engine, and its breadth across six IaC vendors is a genuine benefit for multi-tool teams. The tradeoff is structural: you choose your vendor at stack creation ("Select your IaC vendor and fill in the required details"), and reusable policy code branches per engine — the Plan policy input swaps the "terraform" field for a "pulumi" field on Pulumi stacks, so governance is vendor-namespaced rather than Terraform-native. Some non-Terraform engines also carry maturity caveats; Pulumi support, for instance, is a labeled feature preview that has "not yet been refined based on real production usage." For a team standardized on Terraform or OpenTofu, a single-engine platform shapes every policy hook and report around Terraform's object model instead.

Public Pricing

The only public price is the entry paid tier, Starter+, at $20,000/year (the free plan covers 2 users and 1 public worker). Older "$399/month Starter" figures on third-party sites are stale. Business and Enterprise pricing is not public.

The pricing for the business and enterprise plans is not public as users must "request a quote".

If interested in reading more, see the report on Terraform Cloud pricing.