Temporal pricing guide details
Pricing Overview
Temporal stands apart in the data pipeline and workflow orchestration category because it offers its full platform as a free, MIT-licensed open-source project with zero restrictions on actions, features, or scale. If you have the infrastructure expertise, you can run Temporal in production forever at $0. For teams that want a managed experience, Temporal Cloud is pay as you go, with no base monthly fee and no minimums: actions start at $50 per million, and storage is billed per GB-hour. The action-based pricing model means your bill scales directly with workflow volume rather than seats or connectors. New accounts get $150 in free credits for 90 days. The action-counting model requires careful attention to avoid bill shock.
Plan Comparison
Temporal Cloud has one pay-as-you-go offering, with no base monthly fee, no minimums and no features locked behind plan upgrades. Support add-ons raise the support level and include an allowance of actions and storage.
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| Feature | Self-Hosted | Pay-As-You-Go | Business support add-on | Enterprise and Mission Critical |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (MIT license) | No base monthly fee; actions from $50 per million | Greater of $500/month or 10% of usage | Contact sales |
| Included Actions | Unlimited | Pay per action | 2.5M | 10M |
| Active Storage | Unlimited | $0.042 per GB-hour | 2.5 GB included | 10 GB included |
| Retained Storage | Unlimited | $0.00105 per GB-hour | 100 GB included | 400 GB included |
| SLA | None | 99.9%, 99.99% with HA | 99.9%, 99.99% with HA | 99.9%, 99.99% with HA |
| SSO via SAML | Self-managed | Included | Included | Included |
| SCIM | Self-managed | Add-on | Add-on | Included |
| P0 Response Time | Community only | — | 2 hours, business hours | 30 minutes, 24/7; 15 minutes with Mission Critical |
| Support Scope | Community forums | Developer support | Advanced technical support | Advanced technical support, optimization and code reviews; dedicated platform architect with Mission Critical |
| Commitments | N/A | Larger discounts via a commit | Progressive discounts or commitments | Progressive discounts or commitments |
Actions start at $50 per million, with self-service volume discounts down to $25 per million; larger discounts for higher volumes are available through a commit. Storage starts at $0.042 per GB-hour for active storage (open workflows) and $0.00105 per GB-hour for retained storage (closed workflows).
Hidden Costs and Considerations
Action counting is the biggest gotcha with Temporal Cloud. Every workflow start, activity completion, timer firing, signal, and query counts as an action. A single workflow with 5 activities, 2 timers, and 1 signal generates roughly 9 actions per execution. At scale, this adds up fast -- a system running 100,000 workflows per day at 9 actions each burns 900,000 actions daily, or roughly 27 million actions in a 30-day month. Self-hosted deployments dodge action costs entirely but require running Cassandra or PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and multiple Temporal service components (frontend, history, matching, worker). Budget for at least one senior infrastructure engineer dedicated to operations.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
These estimates assume Temporal Cloud and typical workflow complexity (5-8 actions per workflow execution).
Solo developer / prototyping: New accounts get $150 in free credits for 90 days. After that, Temporal Cloud has no base monthly fee, so the bill is the actions and storage you use, with actions from $50 per million.
Team of 5 (growth-stage product): A team running production workflows -- order processing, notifications, integrations -- typically executes 2-5M actions per month. If the team wants faster support, the Business support add-on starts at $500/month (the greater of $500 per month or 10% of usage) and includes 2.5M actions, 2.5 GB of active storage and 100 GB of retained storage. SSO via SAML is included; SCIM is an add-on.
Team of 20 (enterprise workloads): Large teams with high-throughput systems easily exceed 10M actions per month. The Enterprise and Mission Critical support add-on, priced through sales, includes 10M actions, 10 GB of active storage and 400 GB of retained storage.
How Temporal Pricing Compares
Temporal occupies a unique position: it is a general-purpose durable execution engine, not a data pipeline tool. Its competitors in the data pipeline category serve different use cases, which makes direct price comparison tricky but still informative.
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| Tool | Pricing Model | Starting Price | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Temporal | Action-based (freemium, self-hosted free) | No base fee; actions from $50 per million (Cloud) | Durable execution, fault-tolerant distributed workflows, long-running processes |
| Airbyte | Connector-based (self-hosted free) | $10/mo (Cloud Standard) | Data integration and ELT pipelines with 600+ connectors |
| Stitch | Row-based (free trial) | $100/mo (Standard) | Simple cloud-based data replication for analytics |
| Hevo Data | Destination-event freemium | Starter from $299/month billed monthly or $265/month billed annually; 5M events/month | Limited connectors, up to 1M events/month; managed ingestion rather than application orchestration |
Temporal's durable application workflows and Hevo's source-to-warehouse pipelines solve different problems. Determine whether the workload needs application orchestration or managed ingestion before comparing prices. Hevo Free covers limited connectors and up to 1M events/month. Starter starts at $299/month billed monthly or $265/month billed annually for 5M events/month. Hevo counts each destination insert, update or delete as an event; usage above the plan quota incurs extra On-Demand fees. Self-hosting also requires infrastructure and operating work; a software license price does not establish the total deployment cost.