Licensing & Infra
Infrastructure per year
What it costs to run the tests: execution grid, device cloud, CI minutes, environments — often the hidden line.
- Unit
- money per year
- Where you enter it
- Licensing & Infra tab, per vendor — once for the whole workspace.
What it means
The yearly cost of the machinery a suite runs on, outside the tool's licence: a browser or device grid, cloud execution minutes, dedicated test environments, CI runners. It is a vendor-level figure, counted once and allocated to applications by their share of cases.
Hosted platforms often bundle execution into the licence and show a low figure here; frameworks you run yourself show a high one.
Why it matters to the cost
It is the line that turns a free framework into an expensive one. Eighteen thousand dollars a year for a self-managed grid and device farm is a common figure, and it recurs; it is also the line most often left off a build-versus-buy comparison.
Typical values
AI-native and hosted platforms: $5,000–$10,000 a year (often partly bundled). Script-based tools: around $12,000. Homegrown frameworks: $18,000 or more.
Typical values describe a category of tool — AI-native, codeless, script-based, homegrown, manual — never a named product. Why we do not price named products.
Try it with your numbers
Infrastructure per year is a row in the calculator. Change it and every total on the page moves with it — free, in your browser, nothing to install.
See how infrastructure per year impacts the calculation of test automation costsLast reviewed 2026-09-15. All terms.