Turning our snowflake infrastructure into an autoscaling fleet via a packer + terraform pipeline was one of my first projects at Buildkite back in 2016:
I'm Sam, a founding engineer still at Buildkite. I've been quite vocal that this was short term gains for long term pains. We're in the process of fixing this - we're working on a free tier and a more accessible paid plan for start ups and scale ups. I want to build tools for everyone, not a select few. Stay tuned. In the meantime I would be happy to have pricing conversations where our pricing doesn't make sense: [email protected].
https://buildkite.com/resources/blog/terraform-techniques-wi...
We still have this pipeline with terraform, but have moved from building packer images for ec2 to building containers for ecs.