Pulumi has emerged as a noteworthy player in the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) world, offering a suite of tools that blend the ease of popular programming languages with the robustness of cloud resource management. This post aims to demystify Pulumi Cloud’s pricing structure.
We will cover:
Pulumi is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, that acts as an OpenTofu/Terraform/CloudFormation/Crossplane alternative.
It leverages programming languages to manage infrastructure resources, and it supports TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Go, .NET, Java, and markup languages like YAML.
See Pulumi vs. Terraform comparison.
Pulumi CLI vs Pulumi Cloud
To run your Pulumi code, you can either leverage Pulumi CLI or take advantage of Pulumi Cloud.
The Pulumi CLI is a tool that developers install locally. It allows them to interact with their Pulumi projects and stacks directly from their terminal. With the Pulumi CLI, developers can initiate actions such as creating, updating, or deleting resources.
On the other hand, Pulumi Cloud is a managed platform that leverages Pulumi to handle your infrastructure management and deployments. It provides a web interface for visualizing resources, and it integrates with various identity providers for implementing role-based access control (RBAC). It also helps with managing and storing your Pulumi state securely, enabling features such as history tracking, audit logs, and integrations with other CI/CD pipelines.
Pulumi Cloud’s pricing revolves around Pulumi Credits, which refers to the price for managing one resource for one hour. In the team edition, each credit costs $0.0005. For billing purposes, Pulumi counts any resource declared in a Pulumi program: If you have a stack with two EC2 instances, for example, you will be billed for three resources.
Pulumi Cloud has four pricing tiers:
- Individual (Always Free Tier)
- Team
- Enterprise
- Business Critical
Individual tier: the starting point
Pulumi’s pricing journey begins with a surprisingly generous free tier. Individual users can harness the full power of Pulumi Cloud at no cost, a nod to the company’s commitment to accessibility and community building. This free tier includes:
- Automatic state management
- Unlimited updates
- Essential features for individual use
- Secret management
In the individual tier, you get 500 Pulumi deployment minutes per month and you can do your deployments via the API and console.
For teams exploring Pulumi, a 14-day trial is also available, followed by 150,000 free Pulumi Credits each month, echoing the trend in cloud services to provide a no-cost entry point for new users.
When you are applying for a trial, you can opt to start one directly in the SaaS version, or you can opt-in for a self-hosted one.
Pulumi Team Edition cost
As teams grow, Pulumi’s Team Edition offers a more scalable solution. You get 150,000 free credits monthly, and these cater to small to medium-sized projects. Once these credits are exhausted, additional usage is billed at $0.0005 per credit (for simplicity, 2000 credits = 1$). This model suits teams whose resource management needs fluctuate, ensuring that costs scale with usage.
In the Team tier, you get everything in the individual tier plus:
- Up to 10 users
- Concurrency of 5
- Unlimited stacks
- CI/CD assistant
- Webhooks
Related to deployments, you get 3000 Pulumi deployment minutes per month, and if you exceed this threshold, you will pay $0.01 per deploy minute.
To support the community, there is also a Pulumi Team Edition for Open Source available. It offers open-source project maintainers access to tools that enable them to innovate and grow their projects more rapidly, free of charge. You need to apply to use this program. You will find more details about it here.
Pulumi Enterprise Edition cost
The Enterprise tier is tailored to suit the needs of bigger organizations, having all the features from the Team tier and unlocking features such as:
- Unlimited users and teams
- RBAC
- SAML/SSO
- Migration from Terraform
- Advanced querying capabilities
- 12×5 support
There is an option to get volume pricing. You get 25 concurrent deployments. However, you need to contact their sales team to get an exact quote, Pulumi Enterprise Edition can be accessed via the AWS Marketplace at a $32,850 yearly cost.
Pulumi Business Critical Edition cost
This tier is tailored for enterprises requiring the utmost in security, compliance, and scalable cloud infrastructure management. This is Pulumi’s top offering, extending beyond the Enterprise tier to meet the demands of sophisticated cloud environments. Here’s an outline of what the Business Critical Edition offers:
- Self-hosting capabilities
- Organizational policies and enforcement
- Remediation policies
- Compliance policies
- Audit log exports
- 24×7 support and a private Slack channel
In this tier, you get 150 concurrent deployments, volume pricing availability, and self-hosted runners.
As for the pricing itself, you need to contact their sales team as you would for the Enterprise Tier, but this offering is also available via Azure Marketplace this time, and it starts at $50,000 yearly:
Pulumi Cloud pricing plans comparison
| Tier | Individual | Team | Enterprise | Business Critical |
| Key Features | – Automatic state management
– Unlimited updates – Essential features for individual use – Secret management |
– Up to 10 users
– Concurrency of 5 – Unlimited stacks – CI/CD assistant – Webhooks |
– Unlimited users and teams
– RBAC – SAML/SSO – Migration from Terraform – 12×5 support |
– Self-hosting capabilities
– Organizational / enforcement / remediation and compliance policies – Audit Log exports – 24×7 support and a private Slack channel |
| Pricing | – Always Free
– 500 Pulumi deployment minutes per month |
– 150k credits free
– $0.0005 per credit – 3000 Pulumi deployment minutes per month |
– Need to contact sales for the exact quota
– $32,850/year on AWS Marketplace |
– Need to contact sales for the exact quota
– $50,000/year on Azure Marketplace |
Pulumi offers a usage-based approach, centered around Pulumi Credits, which allows teams to estimate costs relative to their cloud infrastructure complexity. For even more precision, Pulumi provides a cost calculator tool, enabling teams to estimate expenses based on their specific resource usage. As for all tools that use the Resource under Management (RUM) approach, pricing seems predictable, but in the end, because every resource you manage counts (including security group rules), billing can be cumbersome.
Another important consideration in Pulumi’s pricing structure is the charge for deployment minutes, applicable only when using Pulumi Deployments. This charge, while an additional cost, ensures transparency in pricing, allowing teams to factor deployment time into their overall budget.
Download The Practitioner’s Guide to Infrastructure as Code
Both Pulumi Cloud and Terraform Cloud offer a RUM approach when it comes to pricing, making the overall billing process hard to follow. For both, you need more detailed tracking and management of resource hours to control how much you spend at the end of the month.
Pulumi Cloud supports only Pulumi workflows, and Terraform Cloud supports only Terraform Workflows. Both of these tools get the job done.
Spacelift supports both Pulumi and Terraform, and apart from these tools, you also get OpenTofu, Kubernetes, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Terragrunt, making sure that all of your workflows can be achieved easily.
Spacelift’s pricing model is based on concurrency, ensuring that you won’t need to have a calculator with you at all times to try and predict costs – pricing is very predictable.
With Spacelift you:
- get policies across various decision points
- can build dependencies between stacks and share outputs from one to another
- detect infrastructure drift and optionally remediate it
- can bring your own image, control what happens between runner phases
- can integrate any tool you want
- can build self-service infrastructure
- can do lots more
To better understand how Spacelift compares with Terraform Cloud, feature and pricing-wise, take a look at the comparison here.
Spacelift offers three pricing tiers.To see which tier of Spacelift best suits your business, check out our pricing plans.
Pulumi Cloud’s pricing model, with its combination of a free tier, scalable team edition, and customizable enterprise solutions, offers a flexible path for teams of all sizes. By aligning costs with resource usage, however, the billing is not predictable — making it easy to estimate incorrectly.
If you need an IaC management solution that handles workflows for Pulumi and other tools as well, create a free account with Spacelift today, or book a demo with one of our engineers.
The most flexible management platform for Infrastructure as Code
Spacelift is a sophisticated SaaS product for Infrastructure as Code that helps DevOps develop and deploy new infrastructures or changes quickly and with confidence.
