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Temporal Cloud Cost

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This page is part of the Temporal Platform Hub.

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Add cost-saving tips to help developers optimize Temporal Cloud spending.

As we scale our usage of Temporal Cloud, understanding the cost model is critical for designing cost-efficient workflows. Temporal Cloud is consumption-based, and its pricing is based on Action and Storage.

Our Enterprise contract covers base fees and support, but your specific namespace usage drives the variable costs.

Action​

Actions are the primary unit of consumption-based pricing for Temporal Cloud. They track billable operations within the Temporal Cloud Service.

What counts as an Action?​

  • Workflow Start: Starting a Workflow execution.
  • Activity Start and Retry: Starting and retrying an Activity.
  • Signals: Sending a signal to a Workflow.
  • Timers: A Timer firing.
  • Child Workflows: Starting a Child Workflow.
  • Search Attribute upsert: occurs for each invocation of UpsertSearchAttributes command

For a complete list of billable Actions, see Temporal Cloud Actions.

Cost-saving tip #1: Configure exponential backoff for Activity Retry​

Ensure your Activity Retry Policy uses a BackoffCoefficient > 1.0 (e.g. 2.0) and a reasonable MaximumInterval.

Why: Each retry attempt counts as a billable Action. Aggressive, constant-interval retries during downstream outages will skyrocket Action usage and costs without progressing the workflow.

Storage​

Storage is charged based on Gigabyte-Hours (GB-h). There are two tiers:

  1. Active Storage (higher cost):
    • This is the storage used by Open workflows.
    • It is 40x more expensive than Retained storage.
  2. Retained Storage (lower cost):
    • This is the Event History of Closed Workflows.
    • We pay this to keep the history available for debugging (based on the Namespace Retention policy).

Cost-saving tip #2: Use Continue-As-New for long-running Workflows​

Trigger ContinueAsNew periodically (e.g. every ~4,000 events or daily) for long-running or indefinite workflows.

Why: This closes the current run, moving its Event History from Active Storage (expensive) to Retained Storage (cheap). This creates a ~97% reduction in storage costs for that history data.

Cost-saving tip #3: Use Standalone Activity for single-step jobs​

Pre-Release

Standalone Activity is in pre-release and not recommended for production use. See Standalone Activity documentation for the latest status.

Use a Standalone Activity instead of a Workflow when your use case is a single Activity that does not require Workflow orchestration.

Why: Starting a Workflow to run a single Activity incurs billable Actions for both the Workflow Start and the Activity Start. A Standalone Activity eliminates the Workflow-level Actions, reducing cost and latency.

What's next​