PRICING

Free, and not the trial kind.

One tier, everything in it, running on your own hardware. No seat count, no server count, no feature held back for a plan that does not exist yet.

Self-hosted

The whole control plane, on your own infrastructure.

$0free, forever
  • Every project type — Frappe, Docker, Kubernetes, databases, four clouds, hypervisors
  • Unlimited servers, sites, stacks and clusters
  • Approval-gated pipelines and two-person verification
  • Full RBAC — 352 permissions, scoped per resource
  • Audit ledger, monitoring, alerts and live log streaming
  • Backups with point-in-time recovery and restore verification
  • The AI Engine, with your own provider key
Install it

THERE IS NO PAID TIER YET.

Not a growth tactic and not a free trial. Talos is an independent project that is not yet a registered company, so there is nothing that could take your money. When that changes, paid plans will add hosting and support — not features removed from this list to make room for them.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY COSTS

One small host, and it stays small.

~4 GB RAM

The control plane itself. Jobs execute on your servers, so this does not grow with the fleet.

No egress bill

Talos talks to your hosts over SSH and to nothing else. There is no vendor endpoint to pay for.

No per-seat cost

Add every engineer in the team. Permissions are how you control blast radius, not licensing.

QUESTIONS

Including “what is the catch”.

Is the free version crippled?
No, and this is the question worth answering carefully because the assumption is reasonable. There is no feature flag gating capability, no server count limit and no seat limit. The list above is everything the software does. The reason it is free is that there is currently no legal entity to charge you, not that this is a trimmed edition of something better.
What will the paid tiers cost when they exist?
Undecided, and quoting a number now would be inventing one. The intent is that paid plans buy hosting and support rather than unlocking capability you already have. If you are self-hosting today, the plan is that you keep everything you have.
Is there a hosted version?
Not currently. The codebase supports a multi-tenant mode, and that is how a hosted offering would eventually be built, but nothing is running that you can sign up for. Today, self-hosting is the only way to use Talos.
What does it actually cost me to run?
One small Linux host. The control plane needs about 4 GB of RAM and stays flat as the fleet grows, because jobs execute on your servers rather than inside Talos. Most people run it on something they already have.
Can I use it commercially, for client work?
Yes. Managing client infrastructure — an agency running Frappe for forty companies, say — is the case it was built for, and nothing about that requires a paid plan today.
What support is there without a paid tier?
Community support and the documentation, honestly. There is no support SLA to sell you, and pretending otherwise would be the sort of claim the rest of this site avoids.

Nothing to buy. Something to run.

Three secrets and one compose command, on a host you already have.

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