Yes, Encore has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes access to 2 free dev environments on Encore Cloud, subject to fair use, 1 million distributed tracing events per month, and 7 days of logs and trace retention.
About
Encore is a development platform that automates infrastructure from local development to production. Developers define services and infrastructure in application code, and Encore provisions supporting resources such as databases, queues, buckets, preview environments, and cloud infrastructure in AWS or GCP.
The free Starter plan includes local development with automated infrastructure, declarative infrastructure as code, service catalog and architecture diagrams, 2 free dev environments on Encore Cloud, 1M distributed tracing events per month, 7 days of logs and trace retention, secrets management, CI/CD and automated testing, 1 concurrent build, and community support on Discord.
- 2 free dev environments on Encore Cloud
- 1M distributed tracing events monthly
- 7 days logs and trace retention
- 1 concurrent build
- Local development with automated infrastructure
- Declarative infrastructure as code
- CI/CD and automated testing
- Community support on Discord
Free Tier Value
This free tier is genuinely usable for small projects: it includes 2 dev environments, 1M tracing events, 7 days of retention, and 1 concurrent build, while the cheapest paid plan starts at $49 per member per month. Compared with Pro, it has a meaningful slice of the core platform but with much tighter quotas and fewer pro features, so it lands at about $15/month in practical value. A credit card is not required for the free tier, and the paid trial lasts 14 days.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- Access to 2 free dev environments on Encore Cloud, subject to fair use.
- Includes 1 million distributed tracing events per month.
- Includes 7 days of logs and trace retention.
- Includes 1 concurrent build.
- Includes community support on Discord.
See Encore pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Pro
- distributed tracing events
- 20M / month included
- logs & trace retention
- 30 days
- concurrent builds
- 2
- free dev environments on Encore Cloud
- Unlimited
- Unlimited free dev environments on Encore Cloud
- 20M distributed tracing events per month included
- 30 days logs & trace retention
- 2 concurrent builds (Upgradeable)
- Preview environments per pull request
- Custom domains
- Deploy to your own AWS & GCP
- Email support
Enterprise
- free dev environments on Encore Cloud
- Unlimited
- distributed tracing
- Custom
- logs & trace retention
- Custom
- concurrent builds
- Custom
- Unlimited free dev environments on Encore Cloud
- Custom distributed tracing
- Custom logs & trace retention
- Custom concurrent builds
- Preview environments per pull request
- Deploy to your own AWS & GCP
- Enterprise security and governance features
- Dedicated support and SLAs
Pricing extracted from Encore's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Encore free forever?
Yes. Encore has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
Does Encore require a credit card?
No. You can start on Encore's free tier without entering card details.
What happens when you exceed Encore's free tier?
You move to a paid plan. Encore's cheapest paid plan is Pro at $49 / seat / month.
What is Encore's free tier worth?
Encore's free tier is worth about $15 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 61/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
