Announcing New Harness Pricing and Plans

We are excited to announce new simplified pricing and plans for all Harness modules. Over the past few years, Harness has expanded from its Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service roots to a broader developer-first Software Delivery Platform that brings together adjacent areas such as Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Delivery (CD), Feature Flags (FF) and Cloud Cost Management (CCM). 

This Platform was built from the ground up to provide developers with frictionless, self-service experiences throughout the software development, deployment, and operations lifecycle. Customers of all sizes - individual engineers, small teams, mid-sized businesses, and large-scale global enterprises - are already benefiting from the breadth and the depth of the Harness Platform. Today, we are announcing new tailor-made plans and pricing for these various customer segments with the goal of democratizing world-class software delivery.

4 Plans - Community, Free, Team, and Enterprise

As we thought deeply about how to price the multiple Harness modules, we realized the need to define a framework for our approach first. We concluded that Harness modules should be offered in the form of four plans (see above figure).

1. Our Community Editions are either open source or source available offerings of a Harness module that serves developers and small teams interested in open, community-driven software. These editions are available in the Self-Hosted form only, and the initial deployment usually starts on a developer’s laptop or a single cloud VM. Most module features would be included in these editions, but enterprise platform features (see Enterprise plan below) would be reserved for the commercial plans. The Harness Loves Open Source page highlights our current Community Edition offerings for the Harness CI and CD modules.

2. The Free plan is a fully-featured - albeit limited by usage - offering meant for small startups and groups of developers. Users can start on the free plan without any obligation (and certainly no credit card) by simply signing up for a free-forever account. The Free plan is available for all Harness modules in a SaaS-only option. Click here to get started with our Free plan.

3. The Team plan is a best-in-class offering that is optimized for growing companies. Such companies usually do not need the security, administration, and governance features that larger enterprise companies care for. Therefore, the Team plan does not include such enterprise platform features. Users can convert their Free plan to a paid Team subscription at any time at a very low monthly cost. The Team plan is available for all Harness modules in a SaaS-only option, unless otherwise stated (for example, as in the case of Harness CI Team Self-Hosted as described later in this post).

4. The Enterprise plan is the top-of-the-line, enterprise-scale offering that is purpose-built to serve the world's most demanding businesses. Users on this plan can leverage the full power of Harness’ underlying enterprise platform features focused on security, administration, and governance. Such features include Fine-Grained RBAC, Audit Trails, Pipeline Governance, and Custom Dashboards. Users can convert their Free or Team plan to a paid Enterprise subscription at any time at a low monthly cost. The Enterprise plan allows customers the flexibility to leverage the SaaS option or the Self-Hosted option if they so desire.

A few points to note regarding the above plans:

• All the plans above use a module-specific pricing unit, such as services for Harness CD, and developers for Harness CI. The details of these units are described in the next sections. These units are monitored for active usage over the last 30 days and only this active usage counts towards pricing. In other words, customers do not get charged for inactive units in their Harness account. 
• We will be introducing a self-service billing option via credit card in the near future to help our users manage their Harness subscriptions more easily than ever before. Monthly plans will also be available for subscription at that point of time. 

Now, let’s review how the above framework applies to the four Harness modules.

Harness Continuous Delivery

The Harness Continuous Delivery (CD) module has been priced per service instance since it was first launched in 2017. The exact approach of measuring service instance count varies by deployment technology. For example, a Kubernetes service instance is essentially a pod that gets instantiated when a service is deployed on to a Kubernetes cluster using a CD pipeline. In the same vein, one million serverless function calls were counted as the consumption of a single service instance license.

New Harness CD Pricing Model

Two key pricing unit changes are part of this announcement.

1. For Harness CD, we are shifting to pricing based on the count of services deployed. The reason for this change is that the concept of services is more easily understood by users. A Service refers to the same microservice or custom application that users deploy using a CD pipeline. Therefore, it has a direct correlation to value creation in today's microservices-driven cloud-native era. Service instances, on the other hand, can be extremely dynamic in nature given that their count can vary substantially as business needs change. As a result, users sometimes have a difficult time understanding how many service instances they should budget for. The new service-based pricing unit obviates any such concern because the introduction as well as decommissioning of microservices is always a well-planned engineering initiative and never a surprise. This means that the service count is a relatively stable number, thus, a good unit for pricing Harness CD. Note that an additional service license will be consumed in the increment of 20 active service instances so that monolithic services with a large number of service instances are also accounted for in this approach.

2. For serverless functions deployed using Harness CD, we are shifting to pricing based on the functions deployed. In the new approach, 5 serverless functions are counted as a single service license.

New Harness CD Plans

As shown in the figure above, here  are the four new Harness CD plans.

1. Harness CD Community Edition was launched in January 2022 as a source-available, community-supported Self-Hosted offering of Harness CD. While it lacks many enterprise platform features, it is feature rich when it comes to streamlining deployments across multiple cloud platforms including Kubernetes.

2. Similar to the Harness CD Community Edition, the Harness CD Free plan has all CD features, including support for all deployment types such as Kubernetes, VMs, Serverless, and more. However, it is available only as a SaaS option and has limits of 5 services and 100 deployments per month (after the initial 1000 deployments). 

3. The Harness CD Team plan, starting at $100 per service license per month (with annual billing), does not have the limits of the Free plan but also does not have the platform features of the Enterprise plan. Users can buy a maximum 100 service licenses of the Team plan. 

4. The Harness CD Enterprise plan contains all CD features, as well as the enterprise platform features. Users can buy as many service licenses as desired. 

A few additional points to note:

• The above plans use only active services for pricing purposes. An active service is defined as a unique service with at least one deployment in the last 30 days.
• The above plans and pricing are designed for easy adoption of Harness CD throughout the software delivery life cycle, including various kinds of non-production and pre-production environments. This is because the approach is agnostic of the number of environments a given service is deployed at. Note that an additional service license will be consumed in the increment of 20 active service instances, which can span across as many environments as needed.

Doing Right by Existing Harness CD Customers

Whenever there is a pricing change on a massively popular product like Harness CD, there is always a natural concern on how it will impact existing customers. We would like to assure our existing customers that this announcement is all positive news.

1. Over the next few months, current Harness CD Professional customers will be automatically upgraded to Harness CD Enterprise Plan. Similarly, current Harness CD Essentials customers will be upgraded to Harness CD Team Plan. In both cases, the new plans are more feature-rich when compared to the old plans.

2. Along with the above automatic and free upgrades, existing customers will have the option to continue their current pricing model for the next 18 months. They can choose to switch to the new service-based pricing model if they like, but will not be required to during the next 18 months. Given the attractiveness of the service-based pricing model, we anticipate that most existing customers will choose to leverage this instead of the service instance-model at the next available opportunity.

Harness Continuous Integration

We are excited to announce new plans for the Harness Continuous Integration (powered by Drone) module. We will continue to honor and grow the open source heritage and community of Drone, but are simultaneously adding new plans suited for companies of all sizes, including SaaS versions of Harness CI. Note that the developer-based pricing unit for Harness CI remains unchanged.

New Harness CI Pricing Plans

Harness CI is now available in the following four plans.

1. Harness CI Community Edition, previously known as Drone Open Source, is the super-popular option of getting started with the Drone open source CI project in a self-hosted manner. While it lacks many enterprise platform features, it is feature rich when it comes to build and test automation for cloud native applications.

2. Harness CI Free is a new SaaS-only plan of Harness CI. It is limited to 2500 builds initially without any time limit, followed by 100 builds per month (after the initial 2500 builds are completed).

3. The Harness CI Team plan is a paid plan for growing companies. It is available in both Self-Hosted and SaaS options. The Self-Hosted option was previously also known as Drone Enterprise or Harness CI Essentials. The Team SaaS option is a new plan altogether. Both the SaaS and Self-Hosted Team plan options are priced at $25 per developer per month (with annual billing).

4. The Harness CI Enterprise plan is a paid plan that is built for large companies with the strictest manageability (high availability and horizontal scaling) and security requirements. This plan is also available in both Self-Hosted and SaaS options. Both the SaaS and Self-Hosted Enterprise plan options are priced at $50 per developer per month (with annual billing).

In alignment with the overall Harness plans and pricing framework, the developer unit of Harness CI is also based on actual usage. Every developer committing code into Git repositories used to build via Harness CI over the last 30 days is automatically counted towards this usage. Users do not have to set up any special configuration to understand this active developer count. The Harness Platform does the measurement and also shows the count on the Subscriptions page for users to understand their current and historical usage. Additionally, any Harness CI users simply using the Platform for designing build pipelines or for viewing dashboards are not counted as active developers. Therefore, they are completely free to use Harness CI without any restrictions or cost concerns.

Doing Right by Existing Harness CI Customers

We would like to assure our existing Harness CI customers that this announcement is all positive news. This is because existing plans have simply been renamed and new plans have been added as part of this announcement. Following are the details:

1. Harness CI Community Edition, previously known as Drone Open Source, remains unchanged.
2. Drone Enterprise / Harness CI Essentials plan is now renamed to Harness CI Team (Self-Hosted).
3. The Harness CI Enterprise plan remains unchanged.
4. Harness CI Free and Harness CI Team (SaaS) are new plans. 

Harness Feature Flags

Launched during the Unscripted 2021 conference, Harness Feature Flags (FF) is the latest module on the Harness Platform. It follows an industry standard pricing approach based on developers who manage feature flags with actions such as create, update, enable, disable, and delete. Feature flags are used to manage the experience of the end users of the customer application, also known as Monthly Active Users (MAUs). Specifically, MAUs are defined as unique end users evaluating flags from client-side SDKs (JavaScript, iOS, Android, C/C++, React, and more) over a 30-day period. Each plan comes with a default allocation of MAUs, with the option of buying additional MAUs as needed for our Team/Enterprise plans. Note that all these plans come with the ability to manage unlimited server-side MAUs.

The three plans of Harness FF can be summarized as follows:

1. The Harness FF Free plan helps small teams get started with controlling feature rollouts. A maximum of 2 developers can use this plan, along with a maximum of 25,000 MAUs. 

2. The Harness FF Team plan is optimized for feature flag rollouts at growing companies. A maximum of 50 developers can use this plan at a price of $42 per developer per month (annual pricing). The default allocation of MAUs is capped at 25,000 with the option to buy additional MAUs up to 1M MAUs. Beyond these limits, the users would need the Enterprise plan.

3. The Harness FF Enterprise plan is built with the scalability, security, and governance of feature flags at demanding enterprises. Organizations can use this plan at a price of $75 per developer per month (annual pricing). The default allocation of MAUs is capped at 25,000 with the option to buy as many additional MAUs as needed.

Harness Cloud Cost Management 

New Harness CCM Pricing Plans

We are also announcing new simplified pricing for Harness Cloud Cost Management (CCM). Previously, this module was priced as a percentage of your containerized cloud spend on Kubernetes & Amazon ECS clusters, and a different percentage of your non-containerized cloud spend. With this change, the pricing is now simplified to use a single percentage of your total cloud spend managed by Harness CCM. In other words, the distinction between containerized and non-containerized cloud spend is no longer present. As a solution aimed towards optimizing and automating cloud cost management, Harness CCM is available only as a SaaS option.

Doing Right by Existing Harness CCM Customers

We would like to assure our existing Harness CCM customers that this announcement is all positive news. This is because they will be automatically upgraded to the Harness CCM Enterprise plan, and they can continue to use their current pricing for the next 18 months. Additionally, existing customers can always adopt the new pricing earlier as per their own needs. 

Summary

Harness is well known as a disruptor in the Dev/DevOps tools space. It was first to market with its Continuous Delivery-as-a-Service product and has been a bellwether in empowering customers across all verticals to ship cloud-native code to production faster. 

With the addition of CI, FF, and CCM to the same Harness Platform that powers Harness CD, Harness’ vision of a unified Software Delivery Platform has become a reality. However, users should not be pressured to consume this platform as all or nothing. Every module is designed to be best-of-breed in its own market segment and can be used as a standalone module with no requirement to use any other module simultaneously. With this announcement, you can find pricing and plans that support consumption of every module by customers of every size and vertical.