Vault gives new accounts a $500 one-time signup credit rather than an ongoing free tier. The free plan includes free trial access to IBM HCP Vault Development for up to 25 clients.
About
Vault is HashiCorp's identity-based secrets management platform for securing credentials, certificates, keys, and other sensitive data across users, machines, services, and AI agents.
It helps organizations centrally store and distribute secrets, generate and rotate certificates, manage encryption as a service, and enforce policy-based access controls throughout the secret lifecycle. Vault is designed to support modern security workflows at scale, with features for automation, governance, and protection across hybrid and multi-environment infrastructure.
- Identity-based authentication and authorization for humans, machines, services, and AI agents
- Centralized secrets storage, distribution, and lifecycle management
- Certificate generation, rotation, and revocation
- Encryption as a service for protecting data in transit and at rest
- Policy-driven access controls and automated secret rotation
Free Tier Value
This free offer is a one-time $500 credit, so it has real starter value but not a recurring monthly allowance. The cheapest paid option starts at $0.62 per cluster hour, and the free development tier also has a hard cap of up to 25 clients, so the practical value is meaningful but limited; a credit card is not explicitly waived on the page, and the credit is time-limited by consumption rather than perpetual.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- Free trial access to IBM HCP Vault Development for up to 25 clients.
- Versioned key value storage for storing and versioning secrets.
- User and group management for organizing access.
- Vault agent support for secret delivery and authentication.
- UI with cluster management for managing Vault clusters.
- Encryption as a Service for encrypting data through Vault.
- Dynamic secrets for generating short-lived credentials.
- Auto-rotating secrets for reducing manual secret maintenance.
See Vault pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Development
- cluster_hour
- $0.62 per cluster per hour
- clients
- up to 25
- Limited environment
- Up to 25 clients
- Versioned key value storage
- User & group management
- Vault agent
- UI with cluster management
- Encryption as a Service
- Dynamic secrets
Essentials
- cluster_hour
- $1.58 per cluster per hour
- vault_client_month
- $73 per Vault client monthly
- Production-oriented clusters
- Highly available clusters
- Scales to production workloads
- Versioned key value storage
- User & group management
- Vault agent
- UI with cluster management
- Encryption as a Service
Standard
- cluster_hour
- $1.85 per cluster per hour
- vault_client_month
- $73 per Vault client monthly
- Multi-datacenter high-availability replication
- Versioned key value storage
- User & group management
- Vault agent
- UI with cluster management
- Encryption as a Service
- Dynamic secrets
- Auto-rotating secrets
Enterprise
- Self-managed deployment
- Enhanced security and compliance
- Hybrid workload support
- Premium support included
- Essentials, Standard, and Premium editions available
Pricing extracted from Vault's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Vault free forever?
No. Vault gives new accounts a one-time signup credit of about $500, spent at normal usage rates, then the account moves to pay-as-you-go.
What happens when you exceed Vault's free tier?
Once the signup credit runs out the account moves to pay-as-you-go pricing. Vault's cheapest published paid plan is Development at $0.62 / unit / month.
What is Vault's free tier worth?
Vault's free tier is worth about $500 in signup credit. That maps to an FTV score of 59/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
