Infracost

Profile

Infracost is an open-source and enterprise SaaS platform that enables engineering teams to estimate and optimize cloud infrastructure costs directly within development workflows by analyzing Infrastructure-as-Code before deployment. Licensed under Apache 2.0, the CLI tool parses Terraform, CloudFormation, and AWS CDK configurations to generate cost estimates without requiring cloud credentials. Founded by Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini and backed by Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator, Infracost serves over 3,500 companies including ten percent of Fortune 500 enterprises. The platform implements "shift left" principles for FinOps, transforming cloud cost management from reactive post-deployment analysis into proactive governance embedded in code review processes.

Focus

Infracost addresses the fundamental challenge that infrastructure configuration changes can add substantial monthly cloud costs without immediate visibility during development. The platform enables engineers to understand financial implications of infrastructure decisions during code review rather than discovering them through billing cycles. By integrating cost estimation into pull requests and CI/CD pipelines, Infracost prevents expensive mistakes from reaching production and eliminates costly rework required to correct infrastructure decisions post-deployment. The tool serves software engineers, platform teams, and FinOps practitioners who need to establish cost accountability at the point of infrastructure change, enabling organizations to implement continuous cost optimization as an engineering discipline rather than periodic remediation exercises.

Background

Infracost was founded in 2021 by Hassan Khajeh-Hosseini, Ali Khajeh-Hosseini, and Alistair Scott, who brought over a decade of cloud computing experience from founding multiple startups and creating software used by Sony, Samsung, Disney, and Netflix. The company raised a seed round from Sequoia, Y Combinator, and SV Angel, followed by a Series A led by Pruven Capital. Headquartered in San Diego with a team of 19 employees, Infracost maintains active development of its open-source CLI while operating Infracost Cloud as a commercial SaaS offering. The platform has achieved recognition as a Gartner cool vendor in platform engineering and maintains partnerships with HashiCorp for Terraform Cloud integration.

Main features

Infrastructure cost estimation and diff analysis

Infracost parses Infrastructure-as-Code configurations to generate detailed monthly cost breakdowns showing resource-level pricing across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The platform supports over 1,100 Terraform resources and maintains a Cloud Pricing API containing over ten million prices updated weekly from cloud vendors. Cost diff functionality compares infrastructure versions to show which resources have been added, removed, or modified with net monthly impact calculations. The tool assumes 730-hour monthly runtime for baseline resources and provides configurable usage assumptions for consumption-based services through infracost-usage.yml files, enabling accurate estimates that reflect organizational usage patterns without requiring actual cloud deployment or credentials.

FinOps policy enforcement and governance

The platform enforces organizational cost optimization standards through customizable policy definitions that check infrastructure changes against Well-Architected Framework recommendations and internal requirements. Built-in policies recommend Graviton instances for compatible workloads, newer generation instance types, efficient storage configurations, and proper resource tagging. Organizations define custom policies reflecting specific operational requirements, with violations identified during code review including specific remediation guidance and code locations. Tagging policies validate mandatory tag keys, allowed values, and regular expression patterns, providing immediate feedback when tags are missing or invalid. The Issue Explorer aggregates policy violations across repositories, enabling FinOps teams to track compliance trends and prioritize remediation efforts.

Automated remediation through AutoFix

AutoFix combines static analysis with AI-powered code generation to automatically create pull requests with validated fixes for cost optimization issues. The system validates each proposed fix to ensure it resolves identified problems without introducing new costs or breaking changes, protecting against LLM hallucinations through enterprise-grade verification. AutoFix integrates AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations to propose rightsizing changes based on actual resource utilization patterns. Organizations configure intelligent pacing to prevent overwhelming engineers with simultaneous changes, with automatic assignment to appropriate teams through GitHub CODEOWNERS files. The feature enables organizations to remediate hundreds of optimization opportunities within weeks rather than months of manual effort.