Scalr

Scalr positions itself directly and unambiguously as a cost-effective drop-in replacement for Terraform Cloud, claiming feature parity plus better GitOps support. Naming the incumbent rather than describing a category is unusual and useful, because it tells you exactly what evaluation you are being asked to run.

Two of the differentiators are given away rather than charged for, which is where the cost argument comes from. Drift detection is free, with notifications, remediation and drift dashboards. Self-hosted agents are unlimited and carry no extra cost, letting runs execute on your own infrastructure to meet compliance requirements.

Free unlimited self-hosted agents is the more consequential of the two. Organisations with compliance requirements cannot let a third-party service reach into their private networks, so they must run agents inside their own perimeter, and charging per agent taxes exactly the customers who have no alternative. Removing that charge changes the total cost materially for regulated organisations rather than marginally.

Drift detection matters because infrastructure as code makes a promise that reality frequently breaks. Someone changes a security group in the console during an incident, the code no longer matches what is deployed, and nobody learns until the next apply produces a surprise. Detecting that continuously is what makes the code trustworthy as documentation.

PR-native GitOps covers apply-before-merge, pull request slash commands and run management inside the review process, which is where infrastructure changes should be reviewed. State management allows storing state in Scalr or in your own bucket, so the organisation can retain control of its state files.

Pricing is published and usage-based. A free plan covers up to 50 runs per month with 2 concurrent runs, and the Business plan is $0.99 per run with volume discounts.