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 still on HCP Terraform's free tier, you have very little runway before that decision gets made for you. But this post is not a vent about IBM. It is about something more useful: there is a specific and time-limited set of conditions right now that make this the best moment in years to rethink your IaC and infrastructure design workflow end-to-end - not just swap a remote backend.…