That’s wrong, you can use Pulumi as a team for free so long as you stay under the 150k free credit limit. You don’t have to manage your own state backend.

I’m using the free Pulumi tier at work, we have three EKS clusters, 3 RDS instances, about 6 ECRs, probably 10-12 EC2 instances, various k8s resources, VPCs etc and aren’t paying anything yet.

I do love the product and will be happy to pay when we reach that level.