The Hidden Cost of Homegrown IaC

Successful infrastructure-as-code (IaC) workflows require more than just tools like Terraform, OpenTofu, and Pulumi. You need to build scalable systems for structuring IaC repositories, invoking your tools, and dealing with governance issues such as access management and drift.

It’s common to start out by building custom systems to handle these tasks. Creating your own IaC CI/CD pipelines provides full control and low upfront cost, but homegrown strategies like this can be challenging to scale as you add more providers and environments. They have hidden costs that can quickly become unsustainable as maintenance overheads add up.

With this article, we’re going to unpack these lurking costs to compare how homegrown IaC stacks up against prebuilt solutions. You’ll then be able to make an informed decision about whether it’s actually worth rolling your own IaC strategy.

What we’ll cover:

1. Why do teams build homegrown IaC in the first place?
2. What is the cost of homegrown IaC?
3. Where homegrown IaC costs actually come from
4. Comparing homegrown and prebuilt IaC costs
5. Best practices for minimizing homegrown IaC costs
6. How to migrate away from homegrown IaC

Teams usually build homegrown IaC gradually rather than by design. They begin with a single Terraform repository and an existing CI/CD pipeline, then add scripts and wrappers over time as their infrastructure grows. The main appeal is cost and control. There is no license to buy, the tools are already familiar, and the team decides how runs execute, where state is stored, and how approvals work.

Some teams also deliberately build their own IaC. Managing the pipeline in-house avoids vendor lock-in, and requirements like air-gapped environments, strict compliance rules, or highly specific workflows can be difficult to meet with an off-the-shelf platform.

These reasons are valid at first, but a setup that works for one team and a few stacks often struggles as the number of providers, environments, and engineers increases. This is where the hidden costs of homegrown IaC start to appear.

Homegrown IaC refers to building your own systems to manage IaC workflows. It’s the process of creating your own automated pipelines and governance controls in order to operate solutions like Terraform at scale.

When you take a homegrown approach, you must build the infrastructure you need from scratch. You’re responsible for writing CI/CD pipeline configs, enabling developer self-service access, and handling complex day-two tasks such as drift detection and remediation. To begin with, these tasks may not seem too daunting, but they carry real costs that compound over time.

Having developers build and maintain IaC infrastructure consumes resources that might be better used elsewhere. Homegrown IaC may look free to begin with if team members already have some DevOps skills, but you must assess how DIY options could affect overall development velocity and broader business outcomes. As well as the direct costs, such as team member salaries, self-built IaC can incur high indirect costs if flaky pipelines mean it takes longer to ship changes to customers.

The hidden costs of homegrown IaC are mostly linked to a single theme. It’s easy to underestimate how much work is actually required to implement a scalable IaC workflow. Building governance systems and maintaining infrastructure is a sizable investment that requires long-term commitment. This means there are plenty of opportunities for costs to appear down the line.

Here are some of the key factors to look out for:

1. Hiring costs: Building and maintaining infrastructure workflows generally demands specialist skills. Hiring or training dedicated staff can be a significant extra expense, even if the team can also be deployed to handle other DevOps or platform engineering tasks.
2. Workflow inconsistencies: When you’re implementing your own IaC pipelines and processes, inconsistencies can creep in between teams and projects. Missing standardization, or standards that evolve over time, makes maintenance more complex. It can even cause expensive incidents in the worst case scenario.
3. Governance, security, and compliance blind spots: Gaps in audit trails, permissions, and secrets hygiene are additional risks that can create serious costs. Fixing pipelines that aren’t compliant with your policies or regulatory requirements could require extensive changes that distract from revenue-earning development.
4. Infrastructure operational costs: The infrastructure assets needed to operate custom IaC control planes are a significant expense at scale. Whether you opt for public cloud, on-premises hardware, or a hybrid mix, the cost of running your pipelines could be more expensive than paying for a dedicated infrastructure orchestration platform.
5. Missing or complicated developer self-service access processes: Enabling self-service developer access to infrastructure resources can increase development velocity and let engineers work more autonomously. However, these processes are often complex to implement from scratch. The time required to build them can accrue significant costs. Devs will also be kept waiting in the meantime, meaning software’s not being built as efficiently as it could be.
6. Unexpected incidents due to inadequate drift detection: Drift is one of the biggest problems associated with IaC at scale. It becomes harder and more expensive to fix the longer it exists in an environment. Without automated drift detection, you could experience costly incidents that require detailed investigation to find the true root cause. Yet building an automated drift management process within a DIY architecture is often significantly time-consuming.
7. Inefficient state file management: Managing state files within a homegrown IaC system might look simple at first glance, but when you add in dependencies, concurrency controls, and versioning, it’s not always quite as straightforward as it seems. At scale, fees for storing and accessing state files in remote repositories can become a significant cost.
8. Poor visibility into actual spending: This isn’t a cost per se, but it can certainly affect long-term spending. Homegrown solutions need to be carefully instrumented so you can monitor pipeline activity and understand the associated costs. However, teams usually prioritize getting solutions off the ground, instead of building observability layers. This can lead to blind spots that obscure what you’re really spending.
9. Long-term maintenance costs: It’s tempting to think of IaC as a one-stop shop: You choose your tools, configure a CI/CD pipeline, and watch as your infrastructure assets get provisioned in your cloud accounts. But in practice, pipelines need regular maintenance to implement new workflows, scale infrastructure, update tools, and resolve detected inefficiencies and security vulnerabilities. This ongoing maintenance is a recurring hidden cost that cannot ever be completely eliminated.
10. Increased change lead times: Because homegrown IaC means every new change to your infrastructure workflow must be developed in-house, product lead times could suffer. For instance, if a feature requires infrastructure changes before it can ship, then your IaC pipeline will have to be adjusted first. This adds development roadblocks that may slow delivery and incur indirect costs within your business.

Recognizing these patterns helps you spot where hidden costs lurk in your own IaC strategy, but fixating on monetary cost isn’t the right approach.

Prioritize improvements to workflow consistency, visibility, and efficiency, then track their long-term effect on spending. Sharpen these areas and IaC becomes more powerful and easier to scale, with cost savings following as a side effect.

The true cost of homegrown IaC is often masked when you first implement your solution. It creeps in as you scale up, compliance gaps occur, and workflows start to become inconsistent.

The landscape is a little different for prebuilt IaC solutions. Purpose-designed IaC orchestration platforms let you automate workflows using GitOps strategies, without having to maintain your own infrastructure or any complex pipeline configs. If any fees apply, they’ll usually be easy to predict based on your team’s size and number of workers required, but you’ll have to pay them from day one.

Because every team’s priorities are different, there’s no clear rule for when to build vs buy. But in general, orchestrators tend to excel when you favor predictability, cost-efficient scalability, and minimal ongoing manual maintenance. They may be less suitable for organizations that already have skilled teams on standby, require complex customization, or wish to avoid being locked into a specific vendor’s pricing structure.

If you’re intent on implementing your own IaC architecture, you can take practical steps to help prevent unexpected costs. Here are five tips to remember:

1. Plan for scalability from the start: Designing for scalability from the start can help avoid costly architectural redesigns later. Try to anticipate how your workflows might change going forward: could deployment activity increase, or may you start using additional cloud providers and IaC tools?
2. Standardize all IaC workflows within a centralized platform: Consolidating IaC workflows around a single orchestrated solution ensures you’re not paying for the same technologies twice. Centralized visibility can also help you identify and remove redundant environments to prevent shadow IT from springing up.
3. Document everything to reduce team onboarding costs: Clearly documenting each of your IaC workflows improves long-term maintainability. Not only will it help newcomers become productive faster, but it can also make incident response more efficient. Less downtime means lower costs.
4. Directly embed governance and compliance into workflows: Integrating governance guardrails directly into your IaC workflows is the best way to prevent misconfigurations from reaching production. Policy-as-code tools and IAM platforms reduce the need for manual reviews and provide continual defense against unauthorized activity. This provides long-term cost savings by reducing your risk exposure and letting team members stay focused on productive work.
5. Leverage observability tools to monitor and right-size operating costs in real-time: Large-scale IaC workflows can incur high infrastructure costs when you’re running lots of pipelines and self-service environments. Observability platforms and FinOps tools allow you to monitor deployed resources and precisely attribute costs to the teams responsible for them. You can then right-size over-provisioned assets that are driving unnecessary spending.

Moving beyond these best practices, it’s important to accept that no homegrown IaC solution will ever be completely free. Operating infrastructure, hiring specialist teams, and maintaining your environments day-to-day carries a material cost in the end, even if it might be insignificant or invisible when your project begins.

As such, your implementation plan should clearly inform stakeholders what these costs are likely to be and how they could change over time.

Migrating from homegrown IaC to an infrastructure orchestration platform does not require rebuilding everything at once. A phased migration lets you move your IaC state, pipelines, and governance across gradually, one stack at a time.

A typical migration follows five steps:

Step 1: Audit your current setup. Document every stack, state file location, pipeline config, and policy your scripts enforce today. A clear inventory shows what needs to move and in what order.

Step 2: Choose an orchestration platform and run a pilot. Select one team or a group of non-production stacks, then import your existing state so the platform manages your live infrastructure instead of recreating it.

Step 3: Move governance into policy as code. Replace manual approval scripts and undocumented conventions with policy as code, so the same rules apply across every workflow.

Step 4: Enable developer self-service. Give developers a governed catalog to deploy from, and remove the ticket queue that previously depended on your team.

Step 5: Retire your old scripts. After a workflow runs reliably on the platform, delete the custom code it replaced to reduce ongoing maintenance.

Because you migrate by importing the existing state, you can adopt the platform incrementally, without downtime or a full rebuild.

Scripts and pipelines can automate tasks, but the can’t deliver governance, visibility, or safe self-service. That’s the gap a purpose-built orchestration platform fills.

Spacelift replaces homegrown plumbing with infrastructure orchestration built for platform teams, including:

• Policy as code with Open Policy Agent (OPA): Control approvals, restrict the resources teams can create, validate configuration parameters, and define how runs behave when pull requests are opened or merged. Guardrails travel with every deployment instead of living in a script someone forgot to update.
• Multi-IaC workflows: Orchestrate OpenTofu, Kubernetes, Ansible, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Terraform, and other tools from one control plane. Model dependencies between workflows and share outputs across them, so you stop wiring tools together by hand.
• Governed self-service infrastructure: Use Templates to give developers a curated catalog they deploy from by filling out a form. Inputs are validated before anything runs, and every version is pinned to a VCS commit for repeatable results. Platform teams define what can be deployed and how, so developers self-serve without learning the underlying IaC. Blueprints remain available when you just need an independent, editable stack.
• AI-assisted provisioning with Spacelift Intelligence: An Infrastructure Assistant that understands your stacks, state, and runs, so you can ask questions, diagnose failed runs, and create policies in plain language. It pairs with Intent, an agentic deployment model that provisions non-critical infrastructure from natural language, no code required, while your policies, credentials, and audit trail still apply.
• Integrations with third-party tools: Connect Spacelift to the tools your teams already use, and extend governance across them. For example, you can integrate security tools into your workflows using Custom Inputs.

Spacelift also lets you run private workers inside your own infrastructure, so you can execute workflows within your security perimeter. Read the documentation to learn more about configuring private workers.

Try Spacelift by creating a trial account or booking a demo.

Homegrown IaC offers flexibility, control, and customization, along with potentially lower upfront costs. You don’t need to pay any external providers to keep your IaC architecture ticking along. But this apparent affordability is often just an illusion: operating custom IaC pipelines requires specialist skills and burdensome ongoing maintenance.

In comparison, purpose-built IaC orchestration platforms let you implement dependable automated workflows for a predictable monthly fee. With everything included in one ready-to-use platform, total cost of ownership could be lower than DIY approaches.

Although there’ll always be use cases for homegrown IaC, the hidden costs mean it shouldn’t necessarily be your default choice. It’s usually most cost-effective for organizations that have large infrastructure teams and unique security or governance requirements. Before you jump in, remember to ask what the solution you build today could cost you a few years down the line.

Looking for IaC orchestration with no hidden costs? Check out Spacelift to run all your IaC workflows in one place. Spacelift comes with governance, drift detection, and intelligent AI assistance built-in, giving you everything you need to build with IaC at scale.