Infracost

Infracost is the industry-standard tool for shifting cloud cost visibility left into the CI/CD pipeline. By analyzing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates—primarily Terraform, OpenTofu, and CloudFormation—Infracost generates detailed cost breakdowns before resources are even provisioned. Its technical architecture relies on a vast proprietary cloud pricing database that maps Terraform resource parameters to actual CSP (AWS, Azure, GCP) billing line items. For 2026, Infracost has positioned itself as the central 'FinOps Guardrail' for engineering teams, moving beyond simple estimation into automated policy enforcement. It enables teams to prevent 'cost-leakage' by blocking pull requests that exceed budget thresholds or violate resource-tagging standards. The platform supports complex scenarios like usage-based pricing models (e.g., AWS Lambda request counts) through usage files, ensuring estimates reflect real-world traffic. As cloud environments become increasingly complex and multi-cloud, Infracost's ability to provide a unified financial view across Git repositories makes it an essential component of the modern DevOps toolchain, effectively bridging the gap between Finance and Engineering departments.