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You can persist state in Azure Blob storage: <https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/state/#azure-blob-storage>

There are a few limitation on how stack refs work. Not totally sure, but I believe all state files have to be in the same parent folder.

And you can use Azure Key Vault as a secrets provider: <https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/secrets/#configuring-secrets-encryption>

At some scale, managing your own secrets and state is probably going to become a pain and you're going to want this hosting done for you. No monetary restrictions, just the technical one outlined above.

Thanks a lot for the clarification, <@U02FZC2RE0Y>!!
I was kind of confused by some of the terms in regards to the "self-hosted service" option, but I think that's for deploying the Pulumi service in a private cloud/premises, right? That's what needs to be paid on the Business Critical version and not this option of chosing a BlobStorage or an S3 bucket as the Pulumi backend, right?

Correct: Self-hosted service is when you want your own copy of <http://app.pulumi.com|app.pulumi.com>.

You can host your own state (object store: S3, BLOB storage, etc.) and secrets backend (Azure Key Manager, AWS KMS, etc.) free of charge forever.