Infracost scans for Terraform code changes and checks over 3 million prices to create a simple, understandable cost estimate before any resources are launched.

Infracost Community

Hello Team,

A general question which may sound absurd at this point, but what is difference between infracost’s `estimated costs` and platform(GCP) `forecasted costs` ??

I believe the stand out diff between GCP billing(forecasted) and infracost(estimated) is reflection of changes in costs as soon as current real world infrastructure provisioned by Terraform is either modified or added.
GCP Billing updates the billing account after some time and ‘never’ before the resources are provisioned, to accomplish that we are recommended to use Pricing calculator separately.

Good question! You are correct.

Infracost estimates the cost by parsing the terraform code, so when an engineer is making changes, they can have immediate feedback and make better decisions. So in that sense, Infracost is similar to Pricing calculators, expect that there are 3M+ prices between AWS, Azure and Google, cloud pricing is too damn complicated to use manual calculators… See <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRQPPIn5NTw&amp;ab_channel=DevOpsBelfast|this talk> I gave recently for more info.

Thanks <@U01G5T3C76W> will watch the video.