Scalr Introduces A New Pricing Model For Terraform Automation & Collaboration Software

Hello again! Today I’m excited to announce something quite dear to me, and the result of months of customer research: an entirely new pricing model that aligns with value, is easy to predict, doesn’t overcharge, and scales throughout the infrastructure as code journey.

Even better, the Scalr community is equally excited about this coming change, with folks excited that “it doesn’t have any of the weird incentives that pricing per user or per workspace has”, “we won’t have to organize ourselves around a pricing model”, and it “makes it infinitely less likely to be overcharged”.‍

Here it is:

What’s interesting in this price model isn’t so much what we charge for, but what we do NOT charge for.

Gone is the charge per workspace. Charging per workspace is an anti-pattern that creates perverse incentives to create large unmanageable workspaces to reduce direct vendor fees, at the cost of indirect management overhead.

Gone is the charge per user. We want you to invite all your colleagues to Scalr, without asking yourself “do I really need to add another seat if that user only visits the product once a month?”. And furthermore charging per user would put us in an awkward position of standing to lose when customers automate more.

Gone is the charge per concurrent run. You shouldn’t have to pay extra to avoid waiting for your runs to execute. A charge for concurrency is a tax on your impatience and on your productivity, and we don’t stand for that.

Gone is the SSO tax. Still gone, actually. Scalr will never charge you extra for account security, will never push you into more expensive plans for account security, and we strongly encourage the industry to follow suit.

Instead, there are two simple plans: a Starter plan for teams early in their Terraform journey and a Pro plan for organizations scaling Terraform across the org, each priced based on a chosen number of runs per month. 

Each plan includes a number of environments, a Scalr unit of tenancy created and easily managed from a top-level admin layer thats help managed service providers and organizations at growing scale manage tenancy for external clients and independent teams, partition stages of the SDLC, or create any arbitrary grouping of workspaces.

Scalr environments are pretty useful in creating a hierarchy to manage projects and teams better, with a customer saying it “saves a lot of time and maintenance even when you have a small amount of workspaces.”

We’ve also made planning easy. You can change the number of runs per month included in your plan at any time and at no extra cost, we’ve added inexpensive per unit rates to avoid pushing you to a more expensive plan you don’t need, and soon you’ll have spending controls and alerts to better manage it all. 

Finally, those self-hosting Scalr will also have the option to switch to a usage-based model, but they will have to wait a little bit longer.

We believe that the measure of a great pricing model is alignment between value and cost, without disincentives. We believe this usage-based pricing model, that charges primarily on resources consumed and is based on months of customer research and feedback, is a significant milestone towards achieving this, as we reiterate our commitment to the same transparent pricing we committed to in 2020. Scalr has no hidden costs, no “contact sales” barrier, and fully transparent pricing.

This new pricing is available today. Get started now on scalr.io.

Sebastian and Igor,

Scalr cofounders

August 12th edit: Starting today, we're giving all Starter plans 8 extra environments at no charge, and all Pro plans a whopping 95 extra environments at no charge, for a respective total of 10 (hard cap) and 100 (soft cap).