How this calculator works
This calculator estimates your monthly Temporal Cloud bill by taking Actions/month plus active and retained storage, then applying either the Essentials plan, the Business plan, or pure pay-as-you-go rates. Actions bill on a graduated schedule ($50/million for the first 5M, stepping down to $25/million past 200M), while storage bills per GB-hour. On a plan, allowances are subtracted first and only the overage is billed at those same graduated rates, with the plan's flat fee rising to whichever is greater: its base price or 5%/10% of your overage spend. A secondary comparison shows what the same volume would roughly cost on AWS Step Functions Standard Workflows, billed at $25 per million state transitions after 4,000 free.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Temporal "Action" and how is it different from an AWS Step Functions state transition?
An Action is Temporal's billable unit — starting a Workflow, recording a Heartbeat, or sending a Signal each count as one. A Step Functions state transition is counted every time a state in a Standard Workflow executes, including retries. They measure similar things (one unit of orchestration work) but are not identical, so a like-for-like migration estimate should always be validated against your own execution history, not just a 1:1 unit swap.
Why is my Temporal Cloud bill higher than the plan's flat fee?
Essentials ($100/mo) and Business ($500/mo) only cover a fixed slice of Actions and storage — 1M Actions/1GB active/40GB retained on Essentials, 2.5M/2.5GB/100GB on Business. Once you exceed any of those, the overage is billed at Temporal's graduated per-Action and per-GB-hour rates on top of the plan fee, and the plan fee itself grows to the greater of its base price or a percentage of your usage once volume is high enough.
Essentials or Business plan — which is cheaper for my volume?
Essentials is cheaper for nearly every startup-scale workload because its $100 base only rises once 5% of your usage-based spend passes $100. Business's $500 base only pays for itself once you need its higher storage ceilings (2.5GB active / 100GB retained) or its support tier — the raw per-Action price is identical on both plans, so Business rarely wins on Actions volume alone.
Does Temporal storage cost keep growing even if usage is flat?
Retained storage (closed workflow history kept for visibility/audit) accumulates unless you set a shorter retention period, so a flat request volume still produces a slowly rising bill as history piles up. Active storage (open, in-progress workflows) stays roughly flat if you aren't accumulating long-running or stuck workflows, since it clears as workflows complete.
How can I reduce Temporal Cloud costs without dropping durability?
Batch related work into fewer, larger Activities instead of many small ones to cut Action count, shorten the retention period on high-volume Namespaces that don't need long audit trails, and avoid unnecessary Heartbeats on short Activities. For latency-insensitive high-volume workloads, compare against AWS Step Functions Standard Workflows, which can be cheaper per unit of orchestration but lacks Temporal's language-native SDK model and long-running workflow ergonomics.