There’s a lot of talk about how working in the cloud has made processes easier and most importantly, cheaper.
To make that a reality, we need to be aware of the factors that influence cost of resources used in implementing cloud solutions.

Several factors can affect the cost of using Azure services and here are some of the key factors I’ve come to know about:

• Resource type, size and usage (& usage patterns)
• Services and features—Enterprise, WebDirect and CSP customers have varying billing periods. Also, additional services and features, such as security, monitoring, and support, can increase the cost.
• Location—price for resources varies between regions. For instance, colder regions spend less on cooling datacenters and therefore, can afford to charge less.
• Bandwidth—some inbound data transfers and all outbound data transfers from datacenters are priced based on zones.
• Reserved Instances—purchasing 1-3 year plans upfront for multiple products can reduce costs up to 72% compared to pay-as-you-go prices.
• Azure Hybrid Use Benefits—customers with software assurance can use on-premises licenses on Azure at reduced cost with Azure Hybrid Benefit.
• Subscription and billing options—The choice of subscription and billing options, such as monthly or annual payments, can affect the cost.

One thing people do not realise is that they’re probably not taking full advantage of the tools made available to them in this field of cloud computing.
After all, cloud computing—with Microsoft in particular—goes beyond the webpages of the Microsoft Azure portal.

Two of such tools as mentioned earlier are Azure Pricing Calculator and Total Cost of Ownership Calculator.

Before you jump to conclusion, these tools are not exactly substitutes of the other.
While Azure Pricing Calculator is a free web-based tool that helps you estimate your costs on Azure, Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator is a tool that helps estimate the cost savings of migrating workloads to Azure.
We talked about their differences, but what do they have in common?—Price/Cost/Billing Calculators.
Whatever term you decide to use, you’re right as long as they’re synonyms to those words above.

AZURE PRICING CALCULATOR

You can access Azure Pricing Calculator on a browser through this link:

Pricing Calculator | Microsoft Azure

Configure and estimate the costs for Azure products and features for your specific scenarios.

azure.microsoft.com

On the “Products” page, click “Add to estimate” under any product or resource you would like to get an estimate for.

Scroll down that same page to specify the parameters for each resource you added to the estimate.

Notice the difference in the next few images with “Pay as you go”, “3 year savings plan” + “Azure Hybrid Benefit” options selected.

You can also change the currency unit at which the bill will be calculated by scrolling below and clicking on the dropdown blade where a list is available for you to select a suitable option.

The “Save” button saves this current estimate under a provided name on the website under your Microsoft account and you can always go back to find it in there.

Whereas, the “Export” button causes a download of an Excel file that gives a breakdown of your estimate and can be shared or sent to whoever needs to have access to it.

TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP CALCULATOR

As established earlier, Azure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator is a tool that helps estimate the cost savings of migrating workloads to Azure. In other words, it helps make contrasts between running on-premise infrastructure for cloud services and migrating to the cloud.
You can access Azure TCO Calculator on a browser through this link:

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator | Microsoft Azure

The Azure Total Cost of Ownership(TCO) Calculator is used to estimate the cost savings you can achieve by migrating your application workloads to Microsoft Azure.

azure.microsoft.com

On the homepage, you need to specify the current server, database, storage and networking infrastructure that you have on-premises.

Click on the “Next” button at the bottom of the page.

This takes you to a webpage showing Software Assurance Coverage and some others like Licensing programs, that you can specify based on the configuration of your infrastructure.

Clicking the “Next” button initiates the report generation.

Wait for a few moments and the report will be provided which you can view and filter based on Timeframe, Region and Licensing program.

The report is a numerical and graphical representation of the comparison of on-premise cost and migration costs as can be seen below.

The “Save” button saves this current report under a provided name on the website under your Microsoft account and you can always go back to find it in there.
The “Download” button initiates the download of a PDF file of the report.

The “Share” button produces a link that can be copied and shared to anyone so they can view the report on a browser.