Key concepts
Organizations
In Infracost Cloud, organizations are used to manage API keys and associated settings. Every Infracost user has a default organization for personal use. We recommend creating a new organization for your company API key as in the future you'll be able to add other users to organizations.
API keys
Infracost API keys are associated with organizations and can be retrieved from the Org Settings page. If you revoke an API key and generate a new one in its place, you must update all CI/CD integrations and CLI installations that used the old API key.
Team management
From the Members page, you can invite your team members to join your organization. Currently only one role is supported:
- Org Admin: they can do everything in the organization except delete the organization.
From the Members page, you can also change the Org Owner to another member. We treat the Org Owner as the main billing contact for the organization.
Repos
Repos, short for code repositories, is where your code lives in GitHub, GitLab or any other source control system. Repo is our top-level required grouping concept. If Infracost cannot detect it, you can provide it via new environment variables, otherwise cost estimates only show in the "All estimates" tab in Infracost Cloud (and not the dashboard, which shows pull request costs).
A repo contains one or more projects. Infracost Cloud lets you track how the costs of repos and projects change over time.
Projects
Projects are an optional sub-grouping concept within a repo. The majority of Infracost users will have repos that have many projects, these include:
- code paths for mono repos, each path represents a deployment environment such as dev, stage, prod
- workspaces, same idea as above but done using Terraform workspaces, e.g. for dev, stage, prod
- Terraform or Terragrunt modules, which are components of a repo, e.g. core-api or data-stack
If you setup Infracost for a Terraform module repo, you will not need projects as there is no need for a sub-group.
Infracost auto-generates project names based on code paths, workspaces or Terraform/Terragrunt modules. The name appears in the CLI output and pull request comments and Infracost Cloud as shown below.



Customize project names
Sometimes, like when a path such as /tmp/plan.json
is used, the project name can become long and hard to understand. In those cases you may want to set the name to something more understandable.
Project name flag
Use the --project-name
flag with infracost breakdown
and diff
to cutomize the auto-generated project name. This flag can also be set in CI/CD integrations, where you can also use environment variables to customize the value.
export PROJECT_NAME=my-project-$MY_WORKSPACE
infracost breakdown --path plan.json --project-name $PROJECT_NAME
infracost diff --path plan.json --project-name $PROJECT_NAME
The --project-name
flag should be set to the same value for both infracost breakdown
and diff
commands in CI/CD integrations. Otherwise the diff command will not be able to match the projects from the first breakdown run. Failing to do this results in odd diffs.
Config file
The name
attribute in config-files provides the same functionality as the --project-name
CLI flag.