Ah, they have changed the public pricing page. Maybe we were on a grandfathered in deal. They had a starter package between free and enterprise with configurable cluster options that was $60ish a month. We heavily used the policies, certs and organization features that made it a no brainer for that price point for things outside AWS like Heroku.

We were running about $12/mo in aws secrets with no caching and no usage outside our aws services. I taught the team how to cache the secrets in the lambda function and it dropped to a buck a month or less.

If they killed off the starter package then you are right, there are only outrageous options and HCP would not be worth considering for small orgs.