Estimate Azure cost

Estimate Azure monthly running costs before deployment

This stage calculates a retail planning estimate from generated infrastructure parameters and your configured assumptions. It queries the Azure Retail Prices API, not an AI model. It does not deploy resources, forecast migration tokens, or calculate your AI provider bill.

1. 1
   Finish the target's infrastructure.

   Generate its infra/ directory and environment .bicepparam files.

2. 2
   Review migration.costEstimation:

   environment, currency, hosting SKU, instance counts, workload, storage, monitoring, and supported networking assumptions. Review the region in the parameter file.

3. 3
   Run the estimate,

   or let a full batch run this stage after packaging. Network access to Azure retail pricing is required.

4. 4
   Approve the assumptions and exclusions

   in the reports before authorizing deployment.

Single-stage configuration

li estimate-cost --config migration.config.single.yaml

One solution in a batch configuration

li estimate-cost --config migration.config.batch.yaml --solution orders

Omit --solution to estimate all batch solutions. Add --json for result summaries and report paths; open the referenced JSON file for detailed line items. In single-mode interactive CLI, use /estimate-cost, then /open cost. In Windows PowerShell, use li.cmd if the built-in li alias takes precedence.

Read the cost evidence

Under the configured report directory (or reports/<solution-id>/ for a batch using reportDirectory: ./reports), review:

azure-cost-summary.md
azure-cost-estimate-<timestamp>.md
azure-cost-estimate-<timestamp>.json

Reports include the selected parameter file, environment, region, currency, resource/SKU line items, quantities, retail prices, monthly total, assumptions, exclusions, and price meters. The indicative ±20% range is a simple calculation, not a statistical confidence interval.