Documentation / Infrastructure runs
Cost estimation
How a plan changes your monthly cloud bill: turning it on, where the estimate appears on the run and the pull request, what cannot be priced, and how it is billed.
Cost estimation tells you how a plan changes your monthly cloud bill before you apply it. Once the plan finishes, we price it with Infracost's public list prices. The run shows the monthly cost before the change, after it, and the difference.
It is an estimate of your cloud provider's bill at list price. It is not our bill, and it knows nothing about discounts, reservations or credits you have with your provider.
Cost estimation is set for the whole organisation. An owner or an admin goes to Settings → Terraform settings, finds the Terraform cost estimation section and ticks Estimate cost for new plans. Members can see whether it is on, but cannot change it.
It applies to plans that start after you turn it on. Turning it off stops new estimates. Estimates already made stay on their runs.
On the run. Each run's page has an Estimated monthly cloud cost section, with the cost before, the cost after, and the change. It also says how many of the plan's resources were estimated, and names, by type, any it could not price.
On a pull request. When a connected repository opens a pull request, the commit status we post starts with the monthly change, then how many resources were not estimated, then the plan's resource counts. The plan comment on the pull request carries the same figure on an Estimated cloud cost line.
Some resources have no price in Infracost's catalogue. They are listed as not estimated. They are never counted as free, and they are never folded into the total as if they cost nothing.
A run planned while cost estimation was off says No cost estimate was made for this run. If pricing fails, the run says Could not estimate, gives the reason, and shows no figures. It never shows a zero in place of an estimate it could not make. The plan itself is not affected either way: a failed estimate never fails a run.
There is no charge for the feature. When cost estimation is enabled, the seconds a successful estimate takes count as run-minutes, at your Terraform rate. A failed estimate is not billed.
To price a plan, we send Infracost the resource types, regions and sizes in it. We do not send your credentials or your resource names.