HashiCorp expands Terraform free version, adds paid tier for SMBs

HashiCorp has had a free tier for its Terraform product in the past, but it was basically for a single user. Today, the company announced it was expanding that free tier to allow up to five users, while also increasing the range of functions that are available before you have to pay.

“We’re announcing a pretty large expansion of the Terraform Cloud free tier. So many of the capabilities that used to be exclusively in our Terraform enterprise product, we’re now bringing down into the Terraform free tier. It allows you to do central actual execution of Terraform and apply the full lifecycle as part of the free tier,” HashiCorp co-founder and CTO Armon Dadgar explained.

In addition, the company announced a middle tier aimed at SMBs. Dadgar says the new pricing tier helped address some obvious gaps in the pricing catalog for a large sets of users who outgrew the free product yet weren’t ready for the enterprise version.

“We were seeing a lot of friction with our SMB customers trying to figure out how to go from one-user Terraform to a team of five people or a team of 20 people. And I think the challenge was that we had the enterprise product, which in terms of deployment and pricing, is really geared toward Global 2000 kinds of companies,” Dadgar told TechCrunch.

He said this left a huge gap for smaller teams of between five and 100-user teams, which forced those teams to kludge together solutions to fit their requirements. The company thought it would make more sense to have a paid tier specifically geared for this group that would create a logical path for all users on the platform, while solving a known problem.

“It’s a logical path, but it also just answers the constant questions on forums and mailing lists regarding how to collaborate [with smaller teams]. Before, we didn’t have a prescriptive answer, and so there was a lot of DIY, and this is our attempt at a prescriptive answer of how you should do this,” he said.

Terraform is the company’s tool for defining, deploying and managing infrastructure as code. There is an open-source product, an on-prem version and a SaaS version.