Azure Pricing Calculator
VM, Storage & SQL Cost Estimator
Estimate your Virtual Machine compute (by named SKU), Managed Disk, Blob Storage, outbound data transfer, and Azure SQL Database cost. Compare Pay-As-You-Go against Reserved Instances and Savings Plans for Compute, built on 2026 Azure list pricing.
Azure pricing has no flat fee — it’s set per VM SKU (from ~$0.04/hr for a burstable B2s to ~$1/hr for a large memory-optimized VM), per Managed Disk size tier (Standard SSD from ~$0.30/mo at 4 GiB; Premium SSD from ~$1.54/mo at 4 GiB), and by data egress zone (first 100 GB/month free, then roughly $0.087-$0.181/GB depending on source region). A Reserved Instance or Savings Plan for Compute can meaningfully cut the compute line, with the exact percentage varying by SKU and term. (per Azure Pricing, 2026)
How to Use This Azure Pricing Calculator
Azure charges for dozens of independent variables across compute, storage, and networking — a single VM deployment alone generates separate charges for compute hours, disk storage, and egress, before you’ve added a database. Most manual estimates miss at least one of these and come in low. This calculator combines the pieces most workloads actually use into one estimate, condensed into a single page with no sign-in required.
The variables that move your bill the most are VM SKU, pricing model, region, and whether Windows is running without Azure Hybrid Benefit applied. Sizing a disk just above a tier boundary, defaulting to Pay-As-You-Go for a VM that will run continuously for a year or more, and assuming Hybrid Benefit applies without checking the 8-core-license minimum are three of the most common ways teams misjudge an Azure estimate — all three are visible in the breakdown below the moment you calculate.
- 1Virtual Machines: pick a named VM SKU (Burstable B-series, General Purpose D-series, Memory-Optimized E-series, or Compute-Optimized F-series), region, operating system, hours per month, and pricing model — Pay-As-You-Go, 1- or 3-Year Reserved, 1- or 3-Year Savings Plan, or Spot.
- 2Storage: enter Managed Disk (Standard SSD or Premium SSD) size per VM — the calculator rounds up to Azure’s real fixed disk tier — and Blob Storage (Hot tier) in GB.
- 3Data transfer: enter expected monthly outbound data transfer. The first 100 GB is free; the rate after that depends on which of Azure’s three bandwidth zones your region sits in.
- 4Azure SQL Database (optional): add vCores and storage GB for a General Purpose tier database, or leave at zero.
Four quick-fill presets — Dev/Test, Startup, Production, Enterprise — give you a realistic starting point rather than a blank form.
This is a planning estimate, not a quote — see Methodology and Disclaimer below for exactly what is and isn’t included.
Azure Cost Optimization Tips
PAYG for Dev, Commitment for Prod
Use Pay-As-You-Go for VMs you can shut down nights and weekends. Use a Reserved Instance (locked to a SKU, deepest discount) or a Savings Plan for Compute (flexible across families, somewhat smaller discount) for production VMs that run continuously.
Hybrid Benefit Has a License Floor
Azure Hybrid Benefit requires a minimum of 8 core licenses per VM, even for a 4-vCPU box. If your organization has unused on-premises Windows Server licenses under Software Assurance above that floor, applying the benefit removes the Windows surcharge entirely.
Watch the Bandwidth Zone, Not Just the GB
The first 100 GB of outbound data transfer is free every month, but the per-GB rate after that roughly doubles between Zone 1 (US/Europe/UK) and Zone 3 (Brazil/South America/Africa/Middle East) — the same egress volume can cost very different amounts depending on source region.
Mind the Disk Tier Boundary
Managed Disks bill at fixed size tiers. Provisioning 400 GB when the next tier down is 256 GiB means paying for the full 512 GiB tier — sizing just under a boundary, or batching workloads onto fewer larger disks, avoids paying for capacity you don’t use.
Azure Pricing Calculator – Frequently Asked Questions
Disclaimer: This is an independent, unofficial estimation tool built and maintained by UIG Data Lab. It is not produced, endorsed, or verified by Microsoft.
Rates are approximate 2026 East US Pay-As-You-Go list prices for a representative SKU per VM family — actual Azure VM pricing is set per exact instance size and generation (e.g., D4s v5 vs. D4as v5 vs. D4d v5), and can differ from the figure shown here. Managed Disk pricing uses Azure’s real fixed size tiers (Standard SSD E-series, Premium SSD P-series) rather than a smooth per-GB rate, but excludes per-transaction I/O charges. Reserved Instance and Savings Plan discount percentages are approximate per SKU family; exact savings depend on the specific SKU, region, and offer type.
Treat every number on this page as a planning estimate to guide a conversation, not a quote to act on directly. For exact numbers, cross-check this estimate in the official Azure Pricing Calculator, and for any purchase decision, confirm final pricing — and Hybrid Benefit license eligibility — with a Microsoft representative or authorized Azure partner.
Understanding the Azure Pricing Model
Azure pricing has no single number — it’s the sum of independent charges across compute, storage, and networking, each with its own rate structure and discount options. The most common budgeting mistake is pricing the VM alone and forgetting storage and egress. Use the calculator above before reading further to get your baseline number, then use this guide to understand what drives it.
Azure VM Families: Which One Do You Actually Need?
Azure organizes Virtual Machines into families optimized for different workload shapes, and within each family, into specific named SKUs (D2s v5, D4s v5, and so on) that each carry their own list price — a family label alone doesn’t fully determine cost. Picking the wrong family is still a common source of overspending: a memory-optimized E-series VM costs meaningfully more per vCPU than a general-purpose D-series VM with the same core count, and paying for that extra memory bandwidth when you don’t need it is pure waste.
| Family | Best For | Relative Cost | Avoid If |
|---|---|---|---|
| B-Series (Burstable) | Dev/test, low-traffic web apps, intermittent workloads | Lowest | You need sustained high CPU — burst credits deplete under constant load |
| D-Series v5 (General Purpose) | Most production applications, small-to-mid databases | Baseline | Your workload is specifically memory- or compute-bound |
| E-Series v5 (Memory-Optimized) | In-memory databases, caching layers, large analytics workloads | ~30-35% above D-series | Your app isn’t memory-bound — you’re paying for RAM you won’t use |
| F-Series v2 (Compute-Optimized) | Batch processing, gaming servers, CPU-bound web workloads | ~10-15% below D-series | You need more than a modest amount of RAM per core |
Pay-As-You-Go vs. Reserved vs. Savings Plan vs. Spot
Azure’s compute discount structure rewards commitment, but each option trades away flexibility differently:
- Pay-As-You-Go: Billed hourly, stoppable anytime. Right for dev/test VMs, short-term projects, and workloads you’re still sizing. Note that stopping the VM halts compute billing, but the Managed Disk and other attached resources can keep generating charges.
- Reserved Instance (1- or 3-Year): Commits to a specific VM size and region for the deepest available discount on that exact SKU — typically in the range of roughly 30-45% for a 1-year term and 50-65% for 3 years, though Microsoft’s published examples show this varying by SKU. Best when you’re confident a specific size will run steadily for the full term.
- Savings Plan for Compute (1- or 3-Year): Commits to an hourly dollar amount rather than a specific VM size, so the discount applies flexibly across eligible compute as you resize or change families. Typically a somewhat smaller discount than a matching Reserved Instance, in exchange for that flexibility.
- Spot: Discounts that are commonly cited up to roughly 80-90% off Pay-As-You-Go, but pricing is dynamic and Azure can reclaim the VM with short notice when it needs the capacity back. Right for fault-tolerant batch jobs, not anything user-facing. Treat any fixed Spot percentage — including the one used in this calculator’s Spot option — as a rough planning figure, not a live rate.
Commitment discounts don’t cover everything. Reserved Instances and Savings Plans apply to VM compute only — Managed Disk, Blob Storage, data transfer, and Azure SQL Database compute are billed separately regardless of your commitment level. A quote that looks dramatically cheaper than expected is usually missing these.
Azure Hybrid Benefit — The Windows Licensing Shortcut, With a Floor
Running Windows Server or SQL Server on an Azure VM normally adds a licensing surcharge on top of the base compute rate — roughly $0.046 per vCPU-hour for Windows Server in this calculator’s model. If your organization already holds on-premises Windows Server licenses with active Software Assurance, Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you apply those licenses to Azure VMs instead, waiving that surcharge.
The benefit has a floor that’s easy to miss: Microsoft requires a minimum of 8 core licenses per VM, even for a VM with only 4 vCPUs. A fleet of small VMs can therefore need more licenses in total than the vCPU count alone suggests. For an 8-vCPU Windows VM running continuously, the surcharge this benefit removes is roughly $270/month — real savings if you already hold enough eligible licenses, but not something to assume from a checkbox alone.
Storage Costs: Managed Disks vs. Blob Storage
Managed Disks attach directly to a VM as its operating system or data disk, billed at the nearest fixed size tier that can hold your provisioned size — not a smooth per-GB rate. Standard SSD suits general file and log storage; Premium SSD costs more per GB, generally more at smaller tiers than larger ones, and delivers the low latency and high IOPS that database and transactional workloads need — but the exact multiple between the two depends on the specific tier and size you land on, not a fixed ratio. Provisioning close to a tier boundary — say, 400 GB when the next tier is 512 GiB — means paying for capacity you didn’t ask for.
Blob Storage is object storage for unstructured data — backups, logs, media files, data lake content — priced by access tier rather than performance tier. Hot tier (~$0.02/GB/month) suits frequently accessed data; Cool and Archive trade lower storage cost for retrieval fees and, in Archive’s case, a mandatory 180-day minimum retention period before you can delete without an early-deletion penalty.
Data Transfer: Priced by Zone, Not One Global Rate
Inbound data transfer into Azure is always free. Outbound data transfer — data leaving Azure to the internet or to another region — is free for the first 100 GB per month, then billed by bandwidth zone: roughly $0.087/GB from North America, Europe and the UK; $0.12/GB from Asia Pacific regions including Southeast Asia, Australia and India; and $0.181/GB from Brazil, South America, Africa and the Middle East. Moving data between Azure regions, such as replicating a database for disaster recovery, is billed as egress too, which is easy to overlook when budgeting for a multi-region deployment.
Azure SQL Database Pricing Basics
Azure SQL Database offers two pricing models: DTU-based (bundled compute/storage/IO tiers like S0-S3, simpler but less granular) and vCore-based (separate compute and storage billing, more transparent and better for right-sizing). The vCore General Purpose tier on Gen5 hardware — the most common starting point for production workloads — bills compute per vCore-hour plus storage per GB/month, independent of your VM compute commitment level, since SQL Database compute reservations and savings plans are purchased separately from VM commitments.
What This Calculator Doesn’t Include
Excluded from this estimate, because Microsoft prices these separately or they fall outside a typical planning estimate:
- Managed Disk transaction charges (per 10,000 read/write/list operations on Standard SSD) — usually small, but can add up for high-transaction workloads
- Geo-redundant storage (GRS/RA-GRS) — costs more than the LRS pricing used here for both Blob Storage and disks
- Azure Functions, App Service, AKS/Container costs, and other PaaS services beyond VMs and SQL Database
- Support plan tiers (Developer, Standard, Professional Direct) — priced separately based on support level
- Negotiated Enterprise Agreement or CSP partner discounts, which only appear on your organization’s actual Microsoft invoice
- Azure SQL Database Reserved Capacity — this calculator prices SQL compute at Pay-As-You-Go rates only
- Public IP addresses, load balancers, backups, and snapshots
Methodology — How This Calculator’s Numbers Are Calculated
This calculator is transparent by design. Here is exactly what happens when you click Calculate:
VM compute. Each VM SKU carries an approximate Pay-As-You-Go hourly rate (East US baseline), scaled by your selected VM count and hours per month, and adjusted by a regional multiplier. This is a simplification — real Azure VM pricing varies by exact size, generation, and offer type — but it’s built from named SKUs rather than a generic per-vCPU formula. A Windows Server surcharge of ~$0.046/vCPU-hour is added unless Azure Hybrid Benefit is checked; the tool reminds you of the 8-core-license minimum but doesn’t verify your license count.
Reserved Instances, Savings Plans, and Spot. 1- and 3-Year Reserved Instance and Savings Plan discounts are applied per SKU family, approximating the ranges Microsoft publishes for that family, to the compute portion only. Spot applies a single illustrative discount as a planning figure — actual Spot pricing changes with real-time capacity and is never guaranteed. None of these discounts apply to storage, data transfer, or SQL Database charges.
Storage and data transfer. Managed Disk cost is looked up from fixed size tiers matching Azure’s real Standard SSD (E-series) and Premium SSD (P-series) pricing, multiplied by VM count — not a smooth per-GB rate. Blob Storage uses a flat Hot-tier LRS rate (~$0.02/GB/month). Outbound data transfer is free for the first 100 GB/month, then billed at your selected region’s bandwidth zone rate (Zone 1, 2, or 3).
Azure SQL Database. Priced using the vCore-based General Purpose tier on Gen5 hardware: compute at approximately $0.152/vCore-hour (730 hours/month) plus storage at approximately $0.115/GB/month, both at Pay-As-You-Go, License-Included rates.