About SevenThirty

An Azure cost estimator for the people who have to stand behind the number: consultants putting a monthly and multi-year figure in front of a client.

The name is the number of hours in an average month (24 × 365 ÷ 12 = 730), the figure Azure's own calculator uses for anything that runs all the time.

SevenThirty exists because the usual tools make a simple question slow to answer. Microsoft's pricing calculator takes a lot of clicking, and third-party calculators often mix hourly, monthly and per-GB rates without showing how they reached the total. Here, every line shows its working, every price is Microsoft's own GBP list price, and the result is something you can hand to a client.

• Dailyprices last refreshed
• 47guided calculators
• About 25,000meters you can search, for UK South and UK West
• UK South, UK West, North Europe, West Europeregions the calculators price

Behind SevenThirty

I'm a senior cloud engineer, and at the start of every project I face the same task: working out what the design will cost. I've always found it harder than it should be. The prices are spread across dozens of pages, each service bills in its own units, and it's easy to cost the headline resources and forget the pieces around them, such as the backup, the monitoring, the private endpoints or the outbound data.

So I built the tool I wanted. SevenThirty takes its prices from Microsoft's official Azure Retail Prices API, refreshed every day, so I'm not copying rates from pricing pages or trusting a figure that may be months old. And it checks each estimate for the components that usually come with what's already in it, so I don't forget any of them before the number reaches a client.

I use it on my own projects. If it's useful on yours, or you spot something it gets wrong, I'd like to hear about it.

How it works

1. Pick a service from the menu, or search every meter Microsoft publishes if there's no guided calculator for it.
2. Configure it. Each calculator starts from a sensible preset and asks only for the inputs that move the price: size, count, GB per month.
3. Add it to the estimate. Each item keeps its own region, so one estimate can span UK South and UK West.
4. Check what's missing. The estimate looks for costs that usually come with what's in it, such as backup, monitoring and outbound data for a VM, and offers to add them or mark them not needed.
5. Export it. A print-ready client pack, or Markdown and CSV for proposals and finance.

Every line shows its working

A figure is always quantity × rate × hours or GB, written out so nobody has to reverse-engineer it:

These are examples of the format; the estimator uses today's rates. Amounts are rounded only for display.

One hours model

Hours per month is set once at the top and drives every hourly resource. Any line can override it, and the override is marked.

Some resources have no stopped state: a NAT Gateway, VPN Gateway, public IP or Bastion bills for as long as it exists. If one of these is set below 730 hours, the line warns that the figure only holds if the resource is deleted and redeployed on a schedule.

Standing and usage charges

Every line is labelled as a standing charge, which bills while the resource exists, or a usage charge, which grows with traffic or transactions. The summary shows the split, so you can tell a client what they pay for the platform simply existing.

Commitments and the forecast

Where Microsoft publishes them, 1- and 3-year reservation and savings plan prices appear beside pay-as-you-go, never in place of it. The forecast takes a go-live month, a ramp, an optional discount and contingency, and totals consumption by contract year and by Microsoft fiscal year (July to June).

What an estimate is not

Figures are indicative. They come from retail list prices and exclude VAT. What a client is actually charged depends on their agreement, discounts, licensing and real usage, so treat the total as a planning figure and say so in the proposal. The client pack does this for you in its assumptions and exclusions.

Where prices come from

All prices come from the Azure Retail Prices API, Microsoft's public price list. It needs no sign-in and is the same source behind Microsoft's own pricing pages.

• Native GBP. Prices are requested in pounds (currencyCode='GBP'). Nothing is converted from US dollars, because Microsoft's GBP list prices don't follow the exchange rate.
• Refreshed every morning. A scheduled job fetches the prices for UK South, UK West, North Europe and West Europe, plus the global and zone-priced meters. The date and time of the last refresh is always shown at the top of the page.
• Checked before it's published. The job stops if a price moves more than 25%, if a meter the calculators rely on disappears, or if any calculator can no longer be priced from the new data. When that happens the site keeps the previous day's prices until someone has looked at it.
• Your browser never calls Microsoft. The site loads one small price file published alongside it, so it stays fast and Microsoft's API isn't hit once per visitor.

Calculators only offer what Microsoft prices in the chosen region. If a size or tier isn't sold in UK West, it isn't in the list for UK West.

Use the price data yourself

The files the estimator reads are plain JSON, published at fixed addresses and refreshed each day. You're welcome to read them from a script or a spreadsheet. Start with the manifest, which says when the data was generated and which regions it covers.

Reading prices.json

Rates sit under regions, then the region name (uksouth, ukwest, global and so on), then a short key. For example, regions.uksouth.vm_Standard_D4s_v5_lin is the hourly pay-as-you-go price of a Linux D4s v5 in UK South.

• A plain number is a single rate in GBP, per hour, per GB or per month depending on the meter.
• A list such as [[0, 0], [100, 0.0657]] is a tiered price: each pair is the quantity a tier starts at and the rate from there.
• Keys ending _ri1 and _ri3 are reservation prices for the whole 1- or 3-year term. Keys ending _sp1 and _sp3 are savings plan rates per hour.

The file layout can change as calculators are added, so check the schema field and don't build anything critical on it without pinning a dated history file. The same disclaimer applies as for the estimator: these are Microsoft's retail list prices, republished as found.

Suggest an improvement

SevenThirty is built in the open and gets better when people who use it say what's missing. Suggestions and corrections go through GitHub, where you can see what has already been raised.

What helps most

• A price that looks wrong: the service, the region, the figure you saw, the figure you expected, and a link to Microsoft's pricing page.
• A missing service or option: the SKU or tier as it's named in the portal or Terraform, and roughly how you'd size it for a client.
• A related cost the estimate should have flagged: what you added, and what it should have prompted you about.
• Something confusing: what you were trying to do and where you got stuck.

Please don't include client names or figures from a real engagement; GitHub issues are public.

Privacy and running cost

• Your estimates stay in your browser. They're saved on your own device and are never sent anywhere. To move one to another computer, copy the estimate file from the estimate sheet.
• No accounts, no analytics, no advertising, no cookies.
• One outside request. The page loads its two typefaces from Google Fonts. Everything else comes from this site.
• It costs nothing to run. The site is static files on GitHub Pages and the daily price refresh is a GitHub Actions job, both free for a public repository. The source is on GitHub.