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Hi folks, we want to use pulumi as our IaC solution. What do we lose if we use custom backend like aws s3 instead of aws? Can you guys tell me ? And also is it possible to migrate our state from s3 backend to pulumi cloud 

We want to use only open source parts of pulumi because we don’t have budget for pulumi cloud. So as I understand, its only free for 1 user however if we want more, we need to pay for additional users and also pricing changing depending on the resource count. 

So that’s why we think maybe we can use aws s3 at beginning but maybe pulumi cloud in long term. 

```It is possible to start with one backend and then later migrate to another. This is common if you have began your project with Pulumi using a self-managed backend but later decided to adopt the Pulumi Cloud for easier use within your team. This section describes how to perform this operation, however, if you would like our assistance with a migration, please get in touch.```
Taken from <https://www.pulumi.com/docs/iac/concepts/state-and-backends/#migrating-between-state-backends>