Azure Pricing Calculator

Q: How do I change the region for just one service?

Open that service card and change its own Region box. Leave the others set to Use global region . This lets you price a database in one region and storage in another.

Q: What do LRS, ZRS, and GRS mean for storage?

LRS: 3 copies in one data center. Cheapest. ZRS: copies spread across zones in one region. GRS: also copied to a second region, so it costs about double. RA-GRS / RA-GZRS: same as above but you can read the second copy, so it costs more. More copies means more safety and a higher bill.

Updated Aug 1, 2026 By Jehan Wadia

Introduction

The Azure Pricing Calculator helps you guess what your Microsoft Azure bill will be each month. You pick the services you want, set how much you plan to use them, and the tool adds up the cost right away.

You can add virtual machines, storage, databases, networking, AI tools, and more. For each one, choose a region, a size, and how many hours it runs. The calculator shows your cost per hour, per month, and per year in over 20 currencies.

The tool also shows where your money goes. Charts break down spend by service and by category. A line-item table lists every part of the price. Reserved and Spot pricing, Azure Hybrid Benefit, and Dev/Test discounts are all built in, so you can test cheaper setups fast.

Below your estimate you will find cost saving tips, a scenario compare view for dev, staging, and production, and a 3-year TCO chart that stacks on-premises servers against Azure. A step-by-step section shows the math behind every number, so you can check the work yourself. If you also price workloads on another cloud, our AWS Calculator works the same way.

How to use our Azure Pricing Calculator

Pick the Azure services you plan to run, set how much you will use them, and this Azure pricing calculator shows your hourly, monthly, and yearly cost, a full cost breakdown, saving tips, and a 3-year cost comparison with on-premises servers.

Search services: Type a service name, like "virtual machine" or "blob", to find it fast in the catalog.

Category: Filter the catalog by group, such as Compute, Storage, Databases, or Networking. Click any service to add it to your estimate.

Currency: Choose the money you want to see, like USD, EUR, GBP, or INR. All prices change to match. To check a rate on its own, use the Currency Calculator.

Global Region: Pick the Azure region where most of your services run. Prices go up or down based on the region.

Pricing Model: Choose Pay-As-You-Go, 1-Year Reserved, 3-Year Reserved, or Spot. Reserved and Spot cut compute costs a lot.

Support Plan: Pick your Azure support level. The monthly fee is added to your total. If uptime promises matter to you, the SLA Calculator turns a percentage into allowed downtime minutes.

Azure Hybrid Benefit: Turn this on if you already own Windows Server or SQL Server licences. It removes the licence part of the price.

Dev/Test pricing: Turn this on for dev or test work to drop Windows and SQL licence charges.

Label: Give each added service a short name, like "Web tier VMs", so your breakdown is easy to read.

Region (per service): Keep the global region or pick a different one just for that service.

Pricing Model (per service): Keep the global model or set a different one for that single service.

Service settings: Each service has its own boxes, such as VM size, number of instances, hours per month, disk type and size, storage GB, vCores, RU/s, tokens, or users. Fill in the numbers you expect to use each month. For network planning around those services, the Subnet Calculator and CIDR Calculator help you size address ranges.

Scenario name: Name each scenario, like Development, Staging, or Production.

Usage vs. base configuration (%): Enter how much of your base setup each scenario uses. 50% means half the usage. The Percentage Calculator is handy if you need to work that share out first.

Scenario pricing model: Pick the pricing model for that scenario so you can compare costs side by side.

Physical Servers: Enter how many servers you run on-premises today.

CPU Cores per Server: Enter the number of cores in one server.

RAM per Server: Enter the memory in one server.

On-Premises Storage: Enter your total disk space in your own data center. If your array uses parity or mirroring, the RAID Calculator shows how much usable space you really have.

Cost per Server: Enter the price you pay to buy one server.

Storage Cost per TB: Enter what one terabyte of your own storage costs.

Annual Maintenance (%): Enter yearly hardware support cost as a percent of the hardware price.

Networking Cost per Month: Enter what you pay each month for network links and gear. The Bandwidth Calculator helps you check the link speed you need.

Rack Power Draw: Enter the power your racks pull. A PSU Calculator gives you a good draw figure for a single machine.

Electricity Price per kWh: Enter what you pay for one kilowatt-hour. Our Electricity Cost Calculator works this out from a recent bill.

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE): Enter your cooling and facility overhead factor. 1.6 is common.

IT Labour Hours per Month: Enter the staff hours spent running your servers each month. The Work Hours Calculator can total those hours for you.

IT Labour Hourly Rate: Enter what one staff hour costs. If you only know a yearly salary, the Salary to Hourly Calculator converts it.

Annual Software Licensing: Enter your yearly software licence spend.

Calculate: Click to update your totals, charts, line items, and step-by-step math. Click Reset to start over with the sample setup.

Azure Cloud Cost Estimating: What You Need to Know

Microsoft Azure is a cloud platform. Instead of buying servers, you rent computing power, storage, and databases from Microsoft data centers. You pay only for what you use, and the bill changes every month based on how much you run.

How Azure Pricing Works

Almost every Azure service is billed by a unit. Virtual machines are billed per hour. Storage is billed per gigabyte each month. Databases are billed per vCore-hour. Data leaving Azure to the internet is billed per gigabyte, and the Data Transfer Calculator is useful for sizing that volume. Some services, like Azure Functions or Azure OpenAI, charge per request or per token. A full month is counted as 730 hours, so a machine that never turns off is billed for 730 hours.

Pricing Models That Lower Your Bill

Pay-As-You-Go: Full price. No promise to keep using it. Best for short or unknown workloads.
1-Year Reserved: You promise to use it for a year and save around 40% on compute.
3-Year Reserved: A longer promise, with savings near 60% or more.
Spot: Very cheap leftover capacity, up to about 85% off. Azure can take it back at any time, so only use it for jobs that can stop and restart.

To judge whether a reservation pays for itself, run the numbers through the Payback Period Calculator or the ROI Calculator.

Why Region Matters

The same virtual machine does not cost the same everywhere. East US is often the cheapest baseline. Regions like Switzerland North, Brazil South, or Japan East can cost 10% to 35% more. Picking a nearby cheap region can cut your bill, but laws about where data must live may limit your choice. The Percent Difference Calculator shows how far apart two region prices really are.

Ways to Save Money on Azure

Azure Hybrid Benefit: If you already own Windows Server or SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance, you drop the license part of the price.
Dev/Test pricing: Removes Windows and SQL license charges on test workloads.
Storage tiers: Move files you rarely open from Hot to Cool, Cold, or Archive. Archive storage costs a tiny fraction of Hot, but costs more to read back.
Right-size disks: Standard SSD is much cheaper than Premium SSD. Only pay for Premium when you need fast, steady speed.
Turn things off: Dev and test machines rarely need 730 hours a month. Running them 8 hours a day cuts compute cost by about two-thirds.
Watch egress: Data going into Azure is free. Data going out to the internet is not. The first 100 GB each month is free, then you pay per gigabyte. The Download Time Calculator helps you picture how long large transfers take.

Extra Costs People Forget

A virtual machine is never just the VM. You also pay for its OS disk, data disks, snapshots, backups, public IP, and any data it sends out. Databases add storage and backup charges on top of compute. Support plans are separate too: Developer is about $29 a month, Standard $100, and Professional Direct $1,000. Fold the whole figure into a Monthly Budget Calculator so nothing is missed.

Cloud vs. On-Premises

Buying your own servers means paying up front for hardware, then paying for maintenance, power, cooling, network gear, software licenses, and staff time for three to five years. Azure turns that into a monthly operating cost. A three-year total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison is the fair way to compare the two, because it counts the hidden costs of running your own data center, not just the price of the servers. For a deeper financial view, the NPV Calculator discounts future cloud spend to today's money, the Depreciation Calculator spreads hardware cost over its life, and the Break Even Calculator shows the point where one option overtakes the other.

Formulas used

Monthly cost of a configured service (region-adjusted subtotal)

C_{\text{service}} = \left(\sum_{i} c_i\right) \times m_{\text{region}}

Virtual Machine monthly cost (compute + OS disk + data disks)

C_{\text{VM}} = \left(r_{\text{size}} \times f_{\text{model}} + L_{\text{win}}\right) \times H \times N + r_{\text{os}} \times S_{\text{os}} \times N + r_{\text{data}} \times S_{\text{data}} \times D \times N

Storage cost (capacity \times tier rate \times redundancy multiplier)

C_{\text{storage}} = G \times r_{\text{tier}} \times m_{\text{redundancy}} \times f_{\text{model}}

Tiered internet egress cost (first 100 GB free)

C_{\text{egress}} = \sum_{k} \min\!\left(\max(0,\,G - b_{k-1}),\, b_k - b_{k-1}\right) \times p_k

Serverless Functions consumption cost (GB-seconds + executions)

C_{\text{fn}} = \max\!\left(0,\, E \times \frac{d}{1000} \times \frac{M}{1024} - 400000\right) \times 0.000016 + \frac{\max(0,\,E - 10^6)}{10^6} \times 0.20

Cosmos DB provisioned throughput cost

C_{\text{RU}} = \frac{RU}{100} \times r_{\text{base}} \times f_{\text{model}} \times H \times R

Grand totals (monthly, hourly, annual, currency conversion)

C_{\text{month}} = \sum_j C_{\text{service},j} + C_{\text{support}}, \quad C_{\text{hour}} = \frac{C_{\text{month}}}{730}, \quad C_{\text{year}} = 12\,C_{\text{month}}, \quad C_{\text{local}} = C_{\text{USD}} \times x_{\text{fx}}

3-year TCO comparison and net saving

\begin{aligned} C_{\text{on-prem}} &= H_{w} + H_{w}\frac{p_{m}}{100}\times 3 + 36\,N_{et} + \left(P_{\text{rack}} + N_{s}(0.005\,C_{o} + 0.0004\,R_{am})\right) \times 730 \times p_{kWh} \times \text{PUE} \times 36 + 36\,L\,r_{L} + 3\,S_{w}\\ C_{\text{azure}} &= 36\,C_{\text{month}} + 36 \times 0.4\,L\,r_{L}\\ \Delta &= C_{\text{on-prem}} - C_{\text{azure}} \end{aligned}

Frequently asked questions

Are the prices in this Azure calculator exact?

No. They are close estimates. The tool uses list prices for East US and then adjusts them with a region factor. Your real Microsoft bill can differ because of taxes, special deals, credits, and price changes.

Use the result to plan and compare, then confirm with your Microsoft account team before you buy.

Does the estimate include tax or VAT?

No. The totals are before tax. Add your local tax rate on top of the monthly figure to see what you will really pay.

Are the currency rates live?

No. The calculator uses fixed rates to switch from US dollars into other money. It is fine for planning. For an up to date rate, check a currency tool.

Can I add the same service more than once?

Yes. Click the service in the catalog again, or press the copy button on a service card. This is useful when you want a web tier and a database tier with different sizes.

Give each one a short label so your cost breakdown is easy to read.

How do I change the region for just one service?

Open that service card and change its own Region box. Leave the others set to Use global region. This lets you price a database in one region and storage in another.

How many hours should I enter if my VM only runs in work hours?

Count the hours you keep it on. 8 hours a day for 5 days a week is about 173 hours a month. 12 hours a day, 7 days a week is about 365 hours.

A full month that never stops is 730 hours.

Why can't I pick Spot pricing for some services?

Spot only exists on services with spare capacity, like Virtual Machines, AKS nodes, Container Instances, Machine Learning, and Databricks. Databases, storage, and licence based services do not offer it, so the option is hidden.

What do LRS, ZRS, and GRS mean for storage?

LRS: 3 copies in one data center. Cheapest.
ZRS: copies spread across zones in one region.
GRS: also copied to a second region, so it costs about double.
RA-GRS / RA-GZRS: same as above but you can read the second copy, so it costs more.

More copies means more safety and a higher bill.

What is a vCore and how is it different from a vCPU?

They mean almost the same thing: one virtual processor. Azure uses vCPU for virtual machines and vCore for SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance. In both cases, more cores means more cost per hour.

What are RU/s in Cosmos DB?

RU/s means Request Units per second. It is how Cosmos DB measures work. A small read costs about 1 RU. Writes and queries cost more.

You pay for the RU/s you reserve, per hour, in every region you use. Serverless mode bills only the RUs you actually use.

What is a DBU in Azure Databricks?

A DBU is a Databricks Unit, a measure of processing power per hour. You pay two bills: the DBUs for the software and the virtual machines that run the cluster. This calculator adds both.

Does Azure Hybrid Benefit help a Linux VM?

No. Hybrid Benefit removes the Windows Server or SQL Server licence charge. Linux VMs have no Windows licence, so the price does not change.

Can I use Dev/Test pricing and Hybrid Benefit at the same time?

You can turn both on, but they remove the same licence charge, so you do not save twice. Use Dev/Test for test work and Hybrid Benefit for production licences you already own.

Are free monthly amounts included?

Yes, for the big ones. The tool gives you the first 100 GB of internet egress free, 1 million free Azure Functions calls and 400,000 GB-seconds, the first 10 VPN tunnels, 5 free Azure DevOps users, and 2 GB of free Artifacts storage.

Why does my bill jump when I add a second Cosmos DB region?

Cosmos DB charges throughput and storage in every region you copy data to. Two regions costs about double one region. Turning on multi-region writes doubles the throughput rate again.

How do I estimate Azure OpenAI cost?

Pick your model, then enter input and output tokens in millions. A token is roughly 4 letters, so 1,000 tokens is about 750 words. Output tokens usually cost several times more than input tokens.

What is the Upfront / one-time line in the summary?

It shows costs you pay once, such as an upfront reservation payment. This tool spreads reserved pricing evenly across the months, so the line stays at zero.

Why does the scenario table show a cheapest badge?

It marks the scenario with the lowest monthly cost. Each scenario uses your same services but changes the usage percent and the pricing model, so you can see how dev, staging, and production compare side by side.

Can I hide a saving tip I do not want?

Yes. Click the X on the tip card. It disappears until you press Reset. Tips are sorted so the biggest saving is at the top.

Why does my TCO show Azure costing more than on-premises?

Usually because the Azure side is running full time at Pay-As-You-Go, or the on-premises numbers are low. Try reserved pricing, fewer hours, or smaller sizes. Also check your server cost, power price, and labour hours are real.

Can I save or share my estimate?

There is no save button. Take a screenshot or copy the line item table into a document. Reset brings back the sample setup at any time.

My service is not in the catalog. What do I do?

Pick the closest match. Many Azure services bill the same way, such as per hour, per GB, or per million calls. For example, use Blob Storage to model other object storage, or Container Instances to model small serverless compute.

Do I need a support plan in my estimate?

Only if you want Microsoft help with tickets. The plan fee is added to your monthly total. Set it to No support plan if you handle problems yourself, but production systems usually need at least Standard.

Why is Archive storage cheap but risky for cost?

Archive holds data for very little each month, but you pay a high fee to read it back and it can take hours to restore. Use it for records you almost never open, not for files your app needs today.

Rate this calculator