Frequently asked questions

• Credits and Pricing

• Product

• Billing and Support

Credits and Pricing

• What is a Pulumi Credit?

  A Pulumi Credit is the price for managing one resource for one hour. If using the Team Edition, each credit costs $0.0005. For billing purposes, we count any resource that's declared in a Pulumi program. This includes provider resources (e.g., an Amazon S3 bucket), component resources which are groupings of resources (e.g., an Amazon EKS cluster), and stacks which contain resources (e.g., dev, test, prod stacks).

  You consume one Pulumi Credit to manage each resource for an hour. For example, one stack containing one S3 bucket and one EC2 instance is three resources that are counted in your bill.

• How much will the Team Edition cost me?

  You pay only for what you use. You are billed for the number of resources managed in your Pulumi account on a per-hour basis. Each partial hour used is billed as a full hour. If there are no resources in your account, then there is no usage for billing purposes.

  Hourly usage is measured in the number of Pulumi Credits, and you are billed one Pulumi Credit to manage one resource for one hour. Each credit costs $0.0005 USD.

  Each month you get 150,000 free Pulumi Credits (roughly 200 resources), so you only pay for the credits used beyond that amount in a given month. Free credits do not roll over from month to month.

  Example: If you manage 625 resources with Pulumi every month, you will use 450,000 Pulumi Credits each month. Your monthly bill would be $150 USD = (450,000 total credits - 150,000 free credits) * $0.0005.

  

• What can I do with my 150k monthly free credits in Team Edition?

  150,000 credits represent approximately 200 resources managed for a month. So, for example, you could manage 200 S3 buckets or 200 EC2 instances for a month using this amount.

  As another example, you could manage something more complex like a production Amazon EKS cluster with associated IAM roles, VPC, subnets, gateway route tables, and a small microservice deployed into the cluster.

• How many credits are needed for my use case?

  It depends on the number of resources managed in your Pulumi organization. This usually maps to the size and complexity of your project or application. On the Team Edition, you receive 150k credits for free every month. Below are a few examples with estimated costs.

  Serverless API with Amazon API Gateway and AWS Lambda

  • Estimated resources: 9
  • Estimated monthly cost without applying free credits: $3.28 USD / 6,570 credits
  • This scenario is a stack with an Amazon API Gateway, an AWS Lambda event handler, and associated IAM roles. View the code for this scenario here.

  Amazon EKS running in a VPC

  • Estimated resources: 20
  • Estimated monthly cost without applying free credits: $7.30 USD / 14,600 credits
  • This scenario is a stack with an Amazon VPC (including subnets, internet gateway, security groups, and route table), Amazon EKS cluster and node group, and associated IAM roles. View the code for this scenario here.

  Amazon ECS cluster and RDS backend running in a VPC

  • Estimated resources: 24
  • Estimated monthly cost without applying free credits: $8.76 USD / 17,520 credits
  • This scenario is a stack with an Amazon VPC (including subnets, security groups, and route table associations), Amazon ECS (including cluster and service, load balancer resources, and IAM resources), and Amazon RDS (including RDS instance and subnet group). Each group of resources (VPC, ECS, RDS) is represented by a component resource. View the code for this scenario here.

• How do I find out how many resources I have?

  There are several ways you can estimate the number of resources you have managed with Pulumi.

  If using Pulumi Cloud: Navigate to the dashboard and review the resource graph titled “Resource Count over Time.”

  If using Pulumi with a self-managed backend: Export your stack state and count the number of lines with a universal resource name (URN). You can pipe the state through a grep command for "urn" to estimate the number of resources.

  If you haven't deployed anything with Pulumi: See the previous FAQ for a few examples of applications and their number of resources.

• Can I prepay for credits?

  Yes, you can! Please contact us to discuss the Enterprise and Business Critical Editions, which include bulk discounts for buying your credits in advance.

Product

• What are Pulumi open source and Pulumi Cloud?

  Pulumi's Infrastructure as Code CLI and SDK are an open-source project that is supported by an active community. Pulumi Cloud is a managed service for the open source CLI and SDK. It tracks your infrastructure’s state and coordinates updates with the CLI, which creates or updates resources to reach your infrastructure’s desired state. It also manages secrets, supports SAML SSO, integrates with CI/CD pipelines, enforces compliance rules, and much more.

  You're not required to use Pulumi Cloud. You can use any cloud or on-premises storage to build and run your own backend.

• Can I use Pulumi for free?

  Yes! There are three ways to use Pulumi for free.

  First, Pulumi Cloud is free to use, now and forever, for individuals. You get all of the convenience of automatic state management, unlimited updates, and many other great features without needing to pay anything at all for it.

  Second, Pulumi is an open source project. You can run Pulumi entirely offline without the online service’s features, and manage state yourself, instead of using the online service. There are no restrictions — it's all there in the open for you to use freely as you'd like.

  Finally, Pulumi Team Edition offers a 14-day free trial. Once the trial is over, you get 150k free Pulumi Credits every month (equivalent to ~200 resources managed free each month). If this isn't a sufficient duration for your project, please contact us, and we are happy to work out a custom trial period for you that makes sense given your proof-of-concept timeline. After your trial expires, no data will be lost, and there is a grace period with soft enforcement.

• How do I get started?

  Follow the Getting Started guide, which walks you through creating and deploying your first Pulumi project.

• What is an organization? What are projects and stacks?

  The key distinction between Pulumi's free Individual Edition and its paid offerings -- Team and Enterprise -- is the presence of an organization. The Individual Edition is great for single users with private projects. However, if you are working within a team, you'll typically want to share your projects. This is what organizations provide. The Team Edition is designed for teams to collaborate on shared infrastructure projects. The Enterprise Edition offers more sophisticated organization management facilities, including RBAC for advanced policy controls.

  Pulumi projects and stacks are a way to organize Pulumi code. You can consider a Pulumi Project to be analogous to a GitHub repo: a single place for code -- and a Stack to be an instance of that code which has separate configuration. For instance, Project Foo may have multiple stacks for Dev, Test, Prod, or perhaps for different cloud configurations (e.g. geographic region).

• Can I start small and upgrade later?

  Yes! If you plan to use Pulumi by yourself, then try the free Individual Edition. If you and your team want to collaborate on infrastructure projects, then try the Team Edition which has a 14-day free trial. After the trial, you get 150k free Pulumi Credits every month (additional credits are $0.00025 USD each). 150k credits is enough to manage a small environment with about 200 resources. To upgrade to Enterprise, please contact us.

• How do I move from Starter or Pro to the new Team Edition?

  Contact us to move to Team.

• Is Pulumi SOC 2 compliant?

  Yes, Pulumi has completed the SOC 2 Type 2 compliance process. Pulumi is committed to operational excellence for our customers.

• Can I host Pulumi Cloud in my cloud or datacenter?

  Yes, we offer a self-hosted Pulumi Cloud for companies that have specific data control requirements and want to maintain complete control over hosting Pulumi Cloud. This option is available in Business Critical Edition. You can get started with a 30-day free trial here.

• How do I convince my boss?

  Do you want to use Pulumi in your organization, but aren't sure how to bring it up with your boss? We've created a sample email to help you explain its benefits. Feel free to use the full letter or pieces of it. We are always happy to meet to learn more about your needs and explain these benefits in person — just contact us.

  Sample Email

  Dear {Name},

  I'd like to propose that we use Pulumi for our cloud infrastructure needs. I've researched the top infrastructure as code platforms, and Pulumi stands out because of its maturity, strong open source community, support for many clouds, and mix of productivity and enterprise controls, meaning it works great for developers and infrastructure teams alike.

  I discovered that Pulumi's community is over 10,000 people and growing, and their customer base includes a diverse array of companies, from startups to some of the largest Fortune 500 and Global 2000 organizations. The top four reasons people are choosing Pulumi are 1) it tames cloud complexity and reduces infrastructure risks, 2) it lets teams use software engineering best practices with infrastructure, 3) it helps teams adopt modern cloud architectures, and 4) it increases collaboration between infrastructure teams, developers, and security engineers.

  Here are some examples of their customers to give you an idea of who is using it and why:

  • Tableau and Fenergo can now release new features faster by empowering their developers to deploy cloud infrastructure easily.
  • Snowflake migrated to Kubernetes across multiple clouds in three months.
  • Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America improved collaboration between its infrastructure and application development teams.
  • Skai managed a complex public cloud migration project.
  • Cockroach Labs, Sourcegraph, and Lemonade created innovative engineering cultures.

  Pulumi is open source and has a SaaS product that helps organizations like ours manage infrastructure with advanced security and policies. Because it's a SaaS, we can start small and grow as our success with the product grows.

  You can learn more on the Pulumi website or view a short introduction video.

  I have many ideas on how Pulumi would deliver immediate value to our team. Should I write a more detailed proposal and share it with you or other members of the team for feedback? The Pulumi team has also offered to have a meeting with us to learn more about our use cases, and discuss potential ways we can work together. Should I set that up?

  Thanks,
  {Your Name}

Billing and Support

• How can I keep track of the Pulumi Credits I’ve used?

  You can keep track of current credit usage and upcoming charges by navigating to Settings and then Billing & Usage in the Pulumi Cloud.

• When will I be billed for using the Team Edition?

  You will be billed for the previous month’s usage on the first day of each month.

• How can groups not seeking a profit use Pulumi for free?

  The Open-Source Free Edition allows organizations not seeking a profit with projects under an open-source license to use Pulumi for free.

• What payment options do you accept?

  For the Pulumi Team Edition, you can pay with a credit card (we use Stripe for processing). Pulumi Enterprise Edition offers additional payment options. Please contact us for those options.

• What if I have billing or account issues?

  For any billing or related issues, please contact us.

• What if I am not satisfied with my Pulumi purchase?

  If you're not satisfied with Pulumi, we offer a 14-day money-back guarantee. No questions asked. Contact us.

• How do I get support for Pulumi?

  12 x 5 support is included in Enterprise Edition and 24 x 7 support (includes a private Slack channel and dedicated support) is included in Business Critical Edition. Contact us if you need help or have any questions.

• Does Pulumi charge sales tax?

  You may be charged a sales tax in addition to your usage fees in certain jurisdictions. It will be a separate line item on your bill.