Temporal
Durable execution platform metered in Actions, with storage split between open and closed workflows, and a self-hosted open-source edition.
- Queues and background jobs
- Yes
- $100/month for Essentials, including 1 million Actions, 1 GB active storage and 40 GB retained storage. Business starts at $500/month with 2.5 million Actions.
- Not documented
Who it suits.
Long-running, stateful workflows where losing execution history is the failure that matters — Temporal keeps event history as first-class storage rather than logs that expire.
Consider something else if…
Entry is $100 a month before any usage, and the unit is an Action, which does not map onto messages or task runs — budgeting requires modelling your workflows, not counting jobs.
Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved
What the documentation says.
Each value below links to the page it was read from, with the sentence it came from. Criteria Temporal does not publish are not listed.
Pricing
Free tier
Yes
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Pricing — Temporal ↗
“Get started for free with $1,000 in credits [...] are you a startup under $30M? Temporal Startup Program Our startup program offers $6,000 in free”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
Entry paid plan
$100/month for Essentials, including 1 million Actions, 1 GB active storage and 40 GB retained storage. Business starts at $500/month with 2.5 million Actions.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Pricing — Temporal ↗
“Essentials Starting at $100/mo. [...] 1 M Actions 1 GB Active Storage 40 GB Retained Storage [...] Business Starting at $500/mo. [...] 2.5 M Actions 2.5 GB Act”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
Pricing model
Per Action, with storage billed separately and split between open and closed workflows. Plans buy SLA tier and support response rather than volume — Essentials is 99.9% with one business day P0 response, Business adds scale. An open-source self-hosted edition runs the same service on your own infrastructure.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Pricing — Temporal ↗
“Cloud platform 99.9% SLA, 99.99% HA options [...] Essentials support with 1 business day P0 response time [...] Host It Yourself Open Source Temporal Self-Hosted [...] Temporal Service Temporal SDKs Temporal CLI Temporal UI Community Support”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
Queues
Included per month
1,000,000 Actions a month on Essentials and 2.5 million on Business. An Action is Temporal's own unit — a workflow operation — and is not comparable to a message, an operation or an execution elsewhere in this category.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Pricing — Temporal ↗
“Essentials Starting at $100/mo. [...] 1 M Actions 1 GB Active Storage 40 GB Retained Storage [...] Business [...] 2.5 M Actions 2.5 GB Active Storage”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
Message retention
Storage rather than a time window: 1 GB of active storage for open workflows and 40 GB retained for closed ones on Essentials, 2.5 GB active on Business. Temporal keeps workflow event history, so retention is bounded by bytes rather than by days — recorded without a magnitude because it is not the quantity this criterion ranks.
Sources (1) →Sources ↓
- Pricing — Temporal ↗
“EVENT HISTORY AND RETENTION Storage Temporal stores workflow event history as Active storage for open workflows and Retained Storage for closed workflows [...] 1 GB Active Storage 40 GB Retained Storage”
Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing
When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.
Temporal in the news
- ShipSec Studio brings open-source workflow orchestration to security operations - Help Net Security
- Temporal Technologies: Pioneering Durable Execution for the Distributed and AI Era - cioreview.com
- The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: World Labs Leads Another AI-Heavy Lineup - Crunchbase News
- Temporal Technologies Revenue 2023: $26M ARR - GetLatka