Azure Pricing Calculator
VM, Storage & SQL Cost Estimator
Estimate your Virtual Machine compute, Managed Disk, Blob Storage, data transfer, and Azure SQL Database cost. Built on 2026 Azure list pricing, with Pay-As-You-Go vs. Reserved Instance comparison.
Azure pricing has no flat fee — it’s driven by VM compute (from ~$0.02/vCPU-hour for burstable B-series to ~$0.065/vCPU-hour for memory-optimized E-series), storage (Blob Hot at ~$0.02/GB/month, Managed Disks from ~$0.05 to $0.14/GB/month), and data egress (first 100 GB/month free, then ~$0.087/GB). A 1-Year Reserved Instance saves roughly 41% on compute versus Pay-As-You-Go; a 3-Year commitment saves roughly 62%. (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 four inputs that move your bill the most are VM family, pricing model, region, and whether you’re running Windows without Azure Hybrid Benefit applied. Picking a memory-optimized VM family for a workload that doesn’t need the extra RAM, defaulting to Pay-As-You-Go for a VM that will run continuously for a year or more, or paying the full Windows licensing surcharge when you already own an eligible on-premises license are the three most common ways teams overpay on Azure without realizing it — and all three are visible in the breakdown below the moment you calculate.
- 1Virtual Machines: pick a VM family (Burstable, General Purpose, Memory-Optimized, or Compute-Optimized), set vCPU count, operating system, hours per month, and pricing model — Pay-As-You-Go, 1-Year Reserved, 3-Year Reserved, or Spot.
- 2Storage: enter Managed Disk (Standard SSD or Premium SSD) in GB, and Blob Storage (Hot tier) in GB.
- 3Data transfer: enter expected monthly outbound data transfer — the first 100 GB is free every month.
- 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, Reserved for Prod
Use Pay-As-You-Go for VMs you can shut down nights and weekends. Use 1- or 3-Year Reserved for production VMs that run continuously — the longer the commitment, the bigger the discount.
Hybrid Benefit Is Easy Money
If your organization has unused on-premises Windows Server or SQL Server licenses under Software Assurance, applying Azure Hybrid Benefit removes the Windows surcharge — often a ~40% cut to Windows VM costs.
Watch Egress, Not Just Storage
The first 100 GB of outbound data transfer is free every month, but high-traffic apps or large data exports can push egress costs above your storage bill without anyone noticing.
Standard SSD Unless You Need Premium
Premium SSD costs roughly 3x Standard SSD per GB. Reserve it for latency-sensitive database or transactional workloads — general file and log storage rarely needs it.
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 Linux Pay-As-You-Go list prices, derived from published Azure rate cards and third-party rate trackers, and are simplified to a linear per-vCPU model for VM compute — actual Azure VM pricing is set per specific instance size and isn’t perfectly linear per vCPU. Managed Disk pricing is tiered by fixed disk size in Azure’s actual billing (e.g., a 400 GB Premium SSD bills at the 512 GB tier) rather than the smooth per-GB rate used here.
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 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. Picking the wrong family is the single most 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 (General Purpose) | Most production applications, small-to-mid databases | Baseline | Your workload is specifically memory- or compute-bound |
| E-Series (Memory-Optimized) | In-memory databases, caching layers, large analytics workloads | ~35% above D-series | Your app isn’t memory-bound — you’re paying for RAM you won’t use |
| F-Series (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. Spot — Choosing a Commitment Level
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.
- 1-Year Reserved: ~41% off compute in exchange for a 12-month commitment to a VM size and region. Right for production workloads you’re confident will run steadily for at least a year.
- 3-Year Reserved: ~62% off compute for a 36-month commitment. The best rate available short of a negotiated Enterprise Agreement, but the least flexible — sizing mistakes are locked in for three years.
- Spot: Discounts up to ~80-90% off Pay-As-You-Go, but Azure can reclaim the VM with short notice when it needs the capacity back. Right for fault-tolerant batch jobs, not anything user-facing.
Reserved Instances don’t cover everything. Reservations apply to VM compute only — Managed Disk, Blob Storage, data transfer, and Azure SQL Database compute are billed separately regardless of your VM commitment level. A Reserved Instance quote that looks dramatically cheaper than expected is usually missing these.
Azure Hybrid Benefit — The Windows Licensing Shortcut
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. If your organization already holds on-premises Windows Server or SQL Server licenses with active Software Assurance, Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you apply those licenses to Azure VMs instead, waiving that surcharge.
For an 8-vCPU Windows VM running continuously, that surcharge alone is roughly $270/month — money Hybrid Benefit eliminates entirely if you have unused licenses sitting idle. It’s one of the few Azure discounts that costs literally nothing extra to claim if you already hold the licenses.
Storage Costs: Managed Disks vs. Blob Storage
Managed Disks attach directly to a VM as its operating system or data disk, billed by provisioned size and performance tier. Standard SSD (~$0.048/GB/month) suits general file and log storage; Premium SSD (~$0.14/GB/month) is roughly 3x the cost but delivers the low latency and high IOPS that database and transactional workloads need. Critically, Azure bills Managed Disks at fixed tier sizes, not a smooth per-GB rate — a 400 GB Premium SSD disk is billed at the 512 GB tier, so provisioning close to a tier boundary can mean 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 (~$0.013/GB) and Archive (under $0.001/GB) 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: The Cost Most Estimates Miss
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 at roughly $0.087/GB for typical volumes, dropping at very high volumes (over 150 TB/month). 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 — 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 are purchased separately from VM Reserved Instances.
What This Calculator Doesn’t Include
Excluded from this estimate, because Microsoft prices these separately or they fall outside a typical planning estimate:
- Storage transaction charges (per 10,000 read/write/list operations) — usually small, but can add up for high-transaction workloads
- Geo-redundant storage (GRS/RA-GRS) — roughly doubles the storage rate versus the LRS pricing used here
- 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
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 family is assigned an approximate per-vCPU hourly rate (B-series ~$0.0208, D-series ~$0.048, E-series ~$0.065, F-series ~$0.042), scaled linearly by your selected vCPU count and VM quantity. This is a simplification — real Azure VM pricing is set per specific instance size (e.g., D4s v5 vs. D8s v5) and isn’t perfectly linear per vCPU — but it produces a reasonable estimate across the family’s typical size range. A Windows Server surcharge of ~$0.046/vCPU-hour is added unless Azure Hybrid Benefit is checked. The region multiplier applies to compute and SQL Database compute only.
Reserved and Spot pricing. 1-Year Reserved applies a 41% discount and 3-Year Reserved a 62% discount to the compute portion only, matching typical general-purpose Reserved Instance savings published by Microsoft. Spot applies an 80% discount as a conservative estimate within Microsoft’s commonly cited 80-90% Spot discount range. These discounts never apply to storage, data transfer, or SQL Database charges.
Storage and data transfer. Managed Disk and Blob Storage are billed at a flat rate per GB per month (Standard SSD ~$0.048, Premium SSD ~$0.14, Blob Hot LRS ~$0.02) — a simplification of Azure’s actual tiered disk billing. Outbound data transfer is free for the first 100 GB/month, then billed at ~$0.087/GB.
Azure SQL Database. Priced using the vCore-based General Purpose tier: compute at ~$0.20/vCore-hour (730 hours/month) plus storage at ~$0.115/GB/month, both at Pay-As-You-Go rates.