HCP Terraform's free tier is gone - what AWS teams should actually do next

When the HashiCorp BSL licence change landed in August 2023, we thought "HashiCorp won't do anything too aggressive - they need the community too much." I was wrong. Fast forward to today: IBM owns HashiCorp for $6.4 billion, the HCP Terraform free tier sunsets on March 31 2026, the Resources Under Management (RUM) pricing model has replaced the predictable per-seat model, and the cost estimation features that used to be table stakes have been quietly removed from standard tiers. If your team is