Tools/temporalio/temporal

Temporal

Durable execution platform for workflow orchestration

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The Lens

By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.

Updated Aug 2026

Temporal runs the workflows that cannot afford to lose their place: payments, order fulfillment, long-running agent jobs. You write ordinary code in Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, or .NET, and Temporal replays it through crashes, timeouts, and mid-flight deploys until it finishes. The entire server is MIT licensed with nothing held back, including the web UI and search.

Operating it is the hard part. Persistence is Postgres, MySQL, or Cassandra, and since server 1.20 you can get advanced visibility straight out of Postgres or MySQL, so Elasticsearch is optional now rather than mandatory. Cassandra visibility was deprecated in 1.21 and removed in 1.24. A modest production cluster is three or more nodes and $100 to $300 a month in infrastructure, plus the ops hours nobody budgets for.

Temporal Cloud repriced and the floor moved. Essentials is $100/mo for 1M actions, Business is $500/mo for 2.5M, Enterprise is quoted. Solo builders should spend the $1,000 in trial credits and then look at windmill-labs/windmill or dagster-io/dagster. Small and medium teams: pay. Large teams with a platform group: self-host.

The catch: determinism. Workflow code cannot roll a random number, read the clock, or call the network directly, and reshaping a workflow that is already running breaks replay unless you version it properly. Every team loses its first month to this.

Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid

open core

Free

The whole Temporal server, MIT licensed. Workflows, activities, timers, signals, queries, schedules, the web UI, advanced visibility, and every official SDK (Go, Java, TypeScript, Python, .NET). No feature is held back for the paid product. Current server line is 1.32.

Cloud Pricing

There is no permanent free tier. New accounts get $1,000 in credits, and after that you pick a plan:

Essentials: from $100/mo. 1M actions, 1 GB active storage, 40 GB retained, one business day P0 response.
Business: from $500/mo. 2.5M actions, 2.5 GB active, 100 GB retained, two business hour P0 response.
Enterprise: quoted. 10M actions, 10 GB active, 400 GB retained, 24/7 with 30 minute P0 response.

Actions past the included allotment step down: $50 per million for the first 5M, $45 for the next 5M, $40 for the next 10M, $35, $30, then $25 per million above 150M. Storage is $0.042 per GB-hour active and $0.00105 per GB-hour retained.

Self-Hosted Costs

Development is $0: Docker Compose with Postgres on your laptop. A small production cluster is three or more server nodes plus Postgres, roughly $100 to $300/mo on cloud VMs, and you can now skip Elasticsearch. At high volume you are looking at Cassandra plus a tuned cluster, $500 to $2,000/mo and up. The infrastructure bill is the small number; 8 to 16 hours a month of ops attention at $75/hr is $600 to $1,200 of real cost.

When to Pay

At 5M actions a month, Cloud runs about $100 to $300 depending on plan while self-hosting costs a similar amount in servers plus far more in attention. Cloud wins for most teams. Self-host when you have data residency or air-gap requirements, an existing platform team, or enough volume that per million action pricing stops making sense.

Server is MIT and complete. Temporal Cloud has no free tier: $1,000 in trial credits, then Essentials from $100/mo or Business from $500/mo. Self-hosting is $100 to $300/mo in servers plus heavy ops time.

What to do by team size

Solo: burn the $1,000 in trial credits, then self-host or step down to something lighter; $100/mo is a lot for one person
Small team: Temporal Cloud Essentials at $100/mo; your time is worth more than the cluster
Medium team: Temporal Cloud Business at $500/mo, or self-host once you have a platform engineer who owns it
Large team: self-host if you have the infrastructure team, otherwise Enterprise for the 24/7 thirty minute response

Self-hosting ops:heavy

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