### Prefect Cloud plan prices checked October 2026 Checked on 27 October 2026 against prefect.io/pricing, the four published plans were: - Hobby: $0, free forever, limited to 2 users, so a third person on the team means leaving this plan. - Starter: $100 per month, a flat fee, so small groups pay the same however they use it. - Team: $100 per user per month, so the bill grows with every seat you add. - Enterprise: contact sales, so there's no public number and any budget has to wait for a quote. ## What each Prefect Cloud plan includes and costs Look at the deployment cap first. On Prefect's pricing page it is the figure that separates the self-serve plans. Nearly everything else you would budget around is published on the pricing page; only Enterprise pricing requires asking sales. The table below shows the plans as Prefect's page lists them. | Plan | Price | Users | Deployments | Serverless compute | Run retention | Support | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | Hobby | Free | Free | 5 | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales | | Starter | $100/mo | $100/mo | 20 | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales | | Team | $100/user/mo | $100/user/mo | 100 | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales | | Enterprise | Contact sales | Contact sales | Unlimited | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales | **5 deployments is the Hobby cap**, and the plan costs nothing. A single team's scheduled pipelines can fill it quickly, and the sixth deployment forces an upgrade decision. 20 deployments on Starter, 100 on Team. Moving between them is a capacity decision, so count your deployments first. Prefect doesn't publish a price for Enterprise, so any budget that includes that row is an estimate until you get a quote. **Only one row has unlimited deployments: Enterprise**. Every other cell on it is "contact sales." Ask for retention, compute and support terms in the contract, because none of them can be verified from the public page. ## Which Prefect plan includes SSO and RBAC? **Price for Enterprise if you need SSO, SCIM, RBAC or audit logs on Prefect Cloud, which means the contract, not the pricing page, sets the real cost of those gates.** ### SSO and SCIM When a team hits its first gate, it is usually SAML single sign-on, which Prefect's pricing page and docs place in the top-tier column. SCIM, which provisions and deprovisions users from your identity provider, sits at the same level. Without it, someone has to remove departed staff from the workspace by hand, and a missed removal leaves a live account that your identity provider no longer controls. **Neither feature has a public price**, so get both in writing in the quote.  ### RBAC and audit logs When someone needs to edit deployments, rotate secrets or touch work pools, role-based access control decides whether they can. Without custom roles, you're limited to the built-in ones, and a user who needs one permission may end up with a much broader role. Audit logs record who changed what, and they're only useful if retention is long enough to cover your incident-review window. The pricing page doesn't state that retention, so ask for it by name. Service accounts follow the same rule: they let pipelines authenticate without a person's credentials, so check which plan includes them and how many you get. The table sets each requirement against the plan or edition that unlocks it. | Requirement | Prefect Cloud | Activepieces | |---|---|---| | SSO/SAML | Top-tier plan | Paid enterprise edition | | SCIM | Top-tier plan | Paid enterprise edition | | RBAC | Higher plans, custom roles at the top tier | Paid enterprise edition | | Audit logs | Higher plans, longer retention at the top tier | Paid enterprise edition | | Service accounts | Higher plans | API keys in the product | | Self-hosting | Not offered for Cloud; open-source server is separate | Community edition, self-hosted | | Entry plan and price | Enterprise, contact sales | Free community edition; enterprise price on request | Compare the gates first. If SSO and audit logs are mandatory, both vendors send you to a sales conversation, and the price depends on what you negotiate there. ## Prefect Cloud versus self-hosted Prefect server Run the open-source Prefect server yourself and you pay nothing in licence fees, but Prefect's documentation places SSO, RBAC and audit logs on the Cloud side. That means **the free option fails the very gates** a sales conversation would've priced. The table below compares the three deployment shapes on cost lines, features, operational burden and where code and data run. Read the Cloud-only column first: any gate you need there removes the self-hosted row from consideration. | | Licence cost | Infrastructure cost lines | Cloud-only features | Operational burden | Where code and data run | |---|---|---|---|---|---| | Prefect Cloud | Plan fee set by tier or contract | Compute for your flow runs | Available on the plan that carries them | Prefect operates the API, UI and database | Orchestration on Prefect's side, runs wherever you point workers | | Self-hosted OSS server | None | API server, database, UI hosting, compute for flow runs | Not included | You run, patch, back up and scale it | Entirely inside your environment | | Hybrid execution | Cloud plan fee | Worker compute only | Available on the plan that carries them | Prefect runs the control plane, you run workers | Code and data stay on your infrastructure; metadata goes to Cloud | ### Features missing from the open-source Prefect server The open-source server differs from Cloud in what it leaves out. It gives you orchestration, scheduling and a UI. It doesn't give you account-level controls such as SSO, role-based access, audit logs and workspace separation, which are Cloud features. If an auditor asks who changed a deployment, the self-hosted server has no built-in answer, so you'd be building one yourself from reverse-proxy logs and database snapshots. ### Hybrid execution and work pools Inside your network, a worker polls a work pool and starts runs on your compute. That is hybrid execution, built on work pools and workers. Your code and data never leave your infrastructure, while Cloud holds the run metadata and the gated features. This is the setup that buys the gate without moving the workload, and the cost is that you still operate the workers. ### Infrastructure costs Prefect does not bill Your servers are not on Prefect's bill; Cloud is. Hybrid and self-hosted both leave compute, networking and storage on your own cloud invoice. Self-hosting adds the database, backups, upgrades and on-call time for an orchestrator that can stall every pipeline you run. The "free" row is only free until you count the person maintaining it.  ## Mistakes that inflate a Prefect Cloud bill Pick Cloud over self-hosting and five errors still move the cost risk rather than remove it, each tied to a published limit: - Buying a mid tier for a feature that sits only on Enterprise. - Ignoring the user and workspace caps on the plan. - Assuming compute is cheap because Prefect only orchestrates, then paying serverless overage per minute. - Trusting the short run-history retention on Hobby. - Sizing the plan from a trial. ### Paying for the wrong tier Check the plan comparison for SSO, RBAC and audit logs before you check the seat price. If your security review requires one of them and it's Enterprise-only, every cheaper tier is money spent on a plan you'll outgrow before rollout.  Your flows still execute somewhere, and Prefect only schedules and records them. On serverless work pools, execution is billed by the minute beyond the included allowance. A long-running flow or a retry loop makes that overage the largest line item, so estimate minutes before you estimate seats. ### Overlooking user, workspace and retention caps On every plan, users and workspaces are limited. Splitting dev, staging and production into separate workspaces hits the cap early and forces an upgrade for structure, not scale. Retention is the quiet one: Hobby keeps run history briefly, so a failure you want to investigate next week may already be gone. None of this shows up in a trial. Light usage and a single workspace never reach the caps, so size from projected production runs, not from how the trial felt. ## Pick Prefect if the job fits Buy Prefect if the work is Python code that data engineers write and schedule. If the work is app-to-app steps with a human approval, you're shopping in the wrong category, whatever the plan costs. ### When Prefect is the right fit If your pipelines already live in Python and you need scheduling, retries and run history, Prefect fits. Gates such as SSO, RBAC and audit logs matter once several engineers share that workspace. The market is crowded, though. In the [DataTalks.Club](https://datatalks.club/surveys/2024-2025/data-engineering) survey, **Airflow was used by 48% of respondents**, so it's the default you'll be compared against. Some 36% used no orchestrator at all, so your real competitor may be a cron job. 12% used Step Functions, the AWS workflow service, meaning Step Functions was not the predominant choice. Mage and Prefect each sat at 7%, and Dagster at 5%. **Prefect is a small player**, so hiring and community answers will be thinner than for Airflow.  ### When the task is business workflow automation instead If the requester is an operations or finance team wiring one SaaS app to another, with a manager approving a step, Prefect's the wrong tool. Nobody there writes Python, so you'd pay for RBAC and audit logs on a platform no one can operate. For that business-workflow task only, Activepieces covers the app-to-app steps without Python, and it doesn't replace Prefect for pipeline code. Its MIT-licensed core, which is the LICENSE file in the Activepieces GitHub repository, is the self-hosted Community Edition, and its Team plan on cloud lists SSO at $200 a month flat with 25 users included, so you can set that beside Prefect's top-tier SSO gate. Its public pricing page lists "unlimited flows" on every plan from Free through Ultimate, so the meter is credits per run, where Zapier's own pricing page bills a task per action. Compare its remaining gates against the same checklist before you decide.  ## Verify Prefect pricing before you buy on Monday Apply the same discipline to Prefect: reopen prefect.io/pricing, list the gated features you need, and get the Enterprise terms in writing before you commit to any tier. Work through the sequence below in order. The cheapest checks come first, so a plan that fails on a gate is ruled out before anyone books a call. 1. Reopen prefect.io/pricing and read the plan comparison as it stands today, not as you remember it or as a review described it. 2. List every gated feature you need (SSO, RBAC, audit logs, workspaces, retention) and mark which plan first includes each one. The lowest plan that covers the whole list's your candidate, whatever its name. 3. If any item sits only on Enterprise, send the quote request with the questions below. 4. Estimate your compute minutes from current run history, so overage is a calculation instead of a surprise on the invoice. 5. Run a trial against that estimate and confirm the gates you listed actually work in your workspace. Don't skip step 2: a quote request without a feature list gets a generic answer. ### Questions to ask in a Prefect quote Ask about SSO first: which identity protocols are supported, whether it covers every workspace or only some, and whether it's bundled or priced separately. Ask the same of retention: how long run history and logs are kept, whether that period is configurable, and what happens to data once it expires. Then ask what counts as overage, how it's metered, and whether it's billed monthly or annually. Get each answer in writing, because a verbal answer won't bind the renewal. ## Frequently asked questions ### Is Prefect Cloud free? Is Prefect Cloud free? Yes, Prefect Cloud has a free Hobby plan, listed on Prefect's pricing page. Free means the gated features sit behind paid plans, so check whether SSO, RBAC, audit logs, or longer retention are on your requirements list before you build on it. If they are, Hobby is a trial, not a destination.  ### Does Prefect Cloud charge per task run? Does Prefect Cloud charge per task run? Prefect's pricing page presents cost through plans and the features attached to them, not as a per-task-run meter. Confirm the current usage limits on the plan you're considering, and get any limit that affects your volume in writing. A limit you discover after launch is a renewal conversation you start with no leverage. ### Moving from Hobby to a paid plan Moving from Hobby to a paid plan generally doesn't mean rewriting flows, because flows are ordinary Python code and the plan governs the account around them, not the flow logic. The work is administrative: set up workspaces, assign roles, and configure SSO if your plan includes it. ### Discounts and data handling Treat any startup or annual-billing discount as a negotiation item, since Prefect's public pricing page doesn't confirm one. Ask sales directly and have the terms put in the quote. A verbal discount doesn't carry into the next term. Your code executes on infrastructure you control, while Prefect Cloud stores orchestration metadata, such as flow and task run state and logs. Read Prefect's security documentation for exactly what's retained and for how long. Retention is a gated setting, so the plan you pick decides how long that history stays visible to your admins. ## Related reading - [Activepieces Audit Logs: Plans, Features and Retention](https://www.activepieces.com/blog/activepieces-audit-logs-plans-features-and-retention) - [Activepieces Cloud Pricing Plans: 2026 Price Guide](https://www.activepieces.com/blog/activepieces-cloud-pricing-plans-2026-price-guide) - [n8n RBAC Explained: How Roles Work and One Costly Miss](https://www.activepieces.com/blog/n8n-rbac-explained-how-roles-work-and-one-costly-miss) ## References - [DataTalks.Club](https://datatalks.club/surveys/2024-2025/data-engineering)What you pay for, then, is visibility and coordination, not compute.