Infracostvs
Spacelift
Spacelift: Orchestration rather than costing, where cost policy is one gate among many
Infracost
Cloud cost estimates in pull requests, with governance in the paid tier
As of 31 August 2026, Infracost has a free plan and paid plans start at $250/month. An Apache-2. Softwr lists it under Cloud. Infracost is made by Infracost Inc., available on Web, macOS, Linux, Windows.
Overview
What Infracost does
Infracost parses Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, ARM and Bicep definitions and produces a cost estimate for the resources they would create, so a pull request that adds an expensive instance type says so before anyone approves it. The command line tool is Apache 2.0 and has never been relicensed, which is a cleaner position than most of the infrastructure tooling around it. The division between free and paid is the thing to understand. The open source tool estimates and flags. It parses definitions, produces breakdowns and diffs, and reports policy and tagging violations locally. Everything that turns that into a control sits in the hosted product: pull request comments, automated remediation, organisation-wide policies, cost guardrails, dashboards and audit trails. The permissive licence protects a real tool, and an increasing share of the product is on the other side of it. The estimates are also list price rather than your bill. Negotiated enterprise agreements, committed use discounts and reserved instance economics require SKU-level price overrides that sit in the Enterprise tier, and the documentation is explicit that usage-based resources such as object storage, functions and data transfer need monthly usage figures supplied by hand or they read as free.
What people use it for
- Teams that want an expensive infrastructure change questioned at review rather than discovered on an invoice
- Platform groups enforcing tagging so cloud spend can be attributed to a team at all
- Organisations adopting FinOps practice without buying a full cloud management platform
- Engineers who want a cost figure in the editor while writing the Terraform
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Infracost.
- Usage-based resources such as object storage, serverless functions and data transfer have no cost without monthly usage figures supplied by hand, and the documentation warns plainly that engineers otherwise read them as free.
- Splitting production from non-production usage assumptions is not supported in the free usage file, which the docs attribute to a missing project filter, so that separation requires the paid product.
- The step from 250 to 1,000 dollars a month is large and the Cloud tier includes only ten admin seats, with developer seats charged at a figure that is not published, so the cost for a large organisation cannot be computed from the pricing page.
- Estimates are list price. Negotiated agreements, committed use discounts and reserved instance economics require SKU-level overrides available only on Enterprise, so the number in the pull request is not the number on the bill.
- The share of the product covered by the Apache-2.0 licence is shrinking. Checks, automated fixes, policies and agent integrations are all hosted-only, so the permissive licence increasingly protects the estimation engine rather than the product.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Infracost
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- InfracostvsSteampipe
Steampipe: Query cloud spend and configuration with SQL instead of estimating from code
Pricing
What Infracost costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free
Free
- 1,000 runs a month
- Terraform, CloudFormation and CDK estimates
- Community support
Starter
$250 /mo
- 10,000 runs a month
- Email support
Cloud
$1,000 /mo
- Ten admin seats, developer seats charged separately
- FinOps policies and cost guardrails
- Dashboards and audit trails
- Automated remediation
Enterprise
On request
- SKU-level price overrides for negotiated rates
- Business unit reporting
- SSO with SAML group mapping
- Service level agreements
Capabilities
Features
Pull request cost diffs
Comments on the change showing what the infrastructure delta costs per month
Multi-format parsing
Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, AWS CDK, ARM, Bicep and Kubernetes
Apache-2.0 CLI
The estimation engine is open source with no relicensing history
FinOps policies
Organisation-wide rules on tagging and spend, in the hosted product
Automated remediation
Pull requests that fix policy violations, in the hosted product
IDE integration
Inline estimates in VS Code and JetBrains editors
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is the open source version genuinely useful on its own?
Yes, for estimation. It parses your definitions and produces breakdowns and diffs locally. What it does not do is comment on pull requests, enforce policy or report across an organisation, all of which are hosted-only.
Will the estimate match my cloud bill?
No. It is list price. Committed use discounts, enterprise agreements and reserved instances need SKU-level overrides that sit in the Enterprise tier.
Why do my S3 and Lambda resources show no cost?
Usage-based resources need monthly usage values supplied in a usage file or defined centrally. Without them they estimate at zero, which is the documented behaviour and the most common way the tool misleads.
Has the licence ever changed?
No. The command line tool has been Apache 2.0 throughout, with no Business Source or AGPL episode, which is unusual in this category.
What is a run?
Not defined on the public pricing page, and the run allowance is what separates the free and Starter tiers, so establish the definition before choosing between them.
Keep looking
Where to go from Infracost
- Infracost alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Infracost pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Infracost badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All Cloud softwareThe full category
- Best Cloud softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Infracost, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
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