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Pricing calculator and Cost Management

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Azure gives you tools to estimate costs before you deploy and to watch and control them after.

Before you deployPricing calculatorestimate: region, tier, billing optionnothing is deployedAfter you deploy: Cost Management· Cost analysis and forecasts (group by tag)· Budgets, with alerts and action groups· Credit and spending quota alerts· Savings recommendations from Advisor
Estimate with the pricing calculator; watch real spending, forecasts and budgets in Cost Management.

The pricing calculator

The Azure pricing calculator estimates the cost of the Azure services you plan to use. Its focus is the cost of provisioned resources in Azure.

You can build an estimate three ways: add individual products, build out a whole solution product by product, or start from an example scenario (such as a web app with a database) and adjust it. For each product you choose options such as:

  • the region, because prices differ between regions,
  • the tier and size, for example a VM size or a storage redundancy option,
  • the billing option: pay-as-you-go, a savings plan or a one- or three-year reservation,
  • support options, programs and offers (such as an Enterprise Agreement price list), and Dev/Test pricing.

It then shows an estimated monthly (and up-front) cost. You can save estimates, share them by link and export them to Excel.

Use it to answer: "What will this Azure solution cost per month?"

It is only an estimate, it does not deploy anything, and you don't need a subscription to use it.

Microsoft Cost Management

Microsoft Cost Management (in the Azure portal) helps you monitor, analyse and control what you actually spend. It reports usage-based costs for Azure services and for third-party Marketplace offers.

  • Cost analysis: explore costs by subscription, resource group, service, region or tag, over time. It also forecasts where spending is heading.
  • Budgets: set a spending limit for a scope (subscription, resource group, and so on). A budget does not stop resources; it watches spending.
  • Cost alerts, all in one place:
    • budget alerts when spending (or forecast spending) crosses a threshold you set, for example 80% of the budget,
    • credit alerts when Azure credit, such as an Enterprise Agreement's prepayment, is running out (sent automatically at 90% and 100%),
    • department spending quota alerts when a department in an Enterprise Agreement reaches a quota you set.
  • Recommendations for savings, surfaced from Azure Advisor.

Budgets can also trigger action groups, for example to email a team or run an automation that shuts resources down.

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