What does Temporal cost when self-hosted?
Quick Answer: Self-hosted Temporal is free under the MIT license — the only cost is the infrastructure to run Temporal Server, its persistence layer (PostgreSQL or Cassandra), and optional Elasticsearch for advanced visibility. As of July 2026, a small production deployment on AWS typically costs about $480-$790/month (server nodes, managed Postgres, optional Elasticsearch, and workers). The managed alternative, Temporal Cloud, starts at the Essentials plan from $100/month (1 million Actions, billed as the greater of $100 or 5% of usage) and is usage-priced on Actions above that — self-hosting wins on cost mainly at high, steady volume where you already run the infrastructure.
Self-Hosted Temporal Licensing
Temporal Server and the official SDKs (Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, PHP, .NET) are released under the MIT license. There is no license fee for running Temporal in production, including in commercial SaaS products. The cost is entirely infrastructure and operations.
Infrastructure cost drivers (AWS, July 2026)
- Temporal Server cluster: stateless; production usually runs 3+ nodes for HA. Three m6i.xlarge instances run roughly $200/month (1-year reserved) to $330/month on-demand.
- Persistence layer: PostgreSQL or Cassandra. An RDS PostgreSQL db.m6g.large with 200 GB is ~$180/month; a three-node Cassandra cluster for high write throughput is ~$900/month.
- Elasticsearch (optional): recommended for advanced visibility queries; a three-node OpenSearch cluster starts ~$180/month.
- Workers: your application servers running workflows/activities — a small deployment is ~$100/month combined.
Typical small deployment total
| Component | Monthly (AWS, July 2026) |
|---|---|
| Temporal Server (3 nodes) | $200-$330 |
| PostgreSQL (db.m6g.large, 200 GB) | $180 |
| Elasticsearch (3× t3.medium.search) | $180 |
| Workers (2 instances) | $100 |
| Total | $660-$790/month |
Without Elasticsearch (standard visibility only), the total falls to roughly $480-$610/month.
Comparison with Temporal Cloud
The managed Temporal Cloud starts at the Essentials plan from $100/month (billed as the greater of $100 or 5% of usage; includes 1 million Actions, 1 GB active / 40 GB retained storage, 99.9% SLA), with Business from $500/month and usage priced on Actions (~$50/million) above the bundle. Cloud includes operational responsibilities self-hosters must handle themselves — cluster upgrades, persistence scaling, Elasticsearch lifecycle, SRE on-call, multi-region replication, and SOC 2 posture.
When self-hosting makes sense
Self-hosting is economical when the team already runs Kubernetes and has SRE capacity, or at high, steady volume where Cloud's per-Action pricing exceeds infrastructure cost. Teams processing hundreds of millions of Actions per month frequently find self-hosted Temporal cheaper even after SRE time. Smaller teams usually find the managed Essentials plan worth the premium until volume justifies dedicated operational investment.
Editor's Note: The honest version of self-hosted-versus-Cloud for Temporal is an SRE question, not a license one — the license is free (MIT), but a production cluster (server nodes, Postgres or Cassandra, optional Elasticsearch, monitoring, upgrades, on-call) is real, ongoing work. Re-checked July 2026: a small self-hosted deployment runs about $480-$790/month on AWS, while Temporal Cloud now starts at Essentials $100/month (1M Actions) — so below serious volume the managed plan is usually cheaper than the SRE time self-hosting consumes; self-hosting wins at high, steady Action volume where you already operate the infrastructure. — Rafal Fila, ShadowGen
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