cost-estimation

Two kinds of Azure price question — where your bill is heading, and what something you have not built yet would cost — answered with every figure labelled as a forecast or a quote.

WHEN TO USE

SCOPE

USE FOR

Forecast where your current Azure spending is heading, based on its history.
Price a server or service you are planning before you create it.
Look up the prices on your company's own Microsoft agreement instead of the public list.

This is a saved copy of the skill's SKILL.md instructions. It may differ from the upstream file or the version you install.

In this document (6)

Azure Cost Estimation

Quick Reference

Intent	Workflow	Primary tools
Forecast existing spend	Cost forecast	`forecast_costs`
Price planned resources	Pricing estimate	Pricing tools

When to Use This Skill

Use for forecasts, pricing, and planning targets.

MCP Tools

Tool	Use
`forecast_costs`	Forecast a scope.
`get_retail_prices`	Get public prices.
`start_pricesheet_download`, `get_pricesheet_status`	Get Enterprise Agreement (EA) or Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) prices.

Fallback: API mappings.

Workflow

Distinguish forecasts from hypothetical pricing.
Confirm scope, assumptions, period, region, OS, and currency.
Load the matching workflow and label every value type.
Never transform MCP results in a shell or interpreter; request tool-side filtering or bounded follow-up queries.

Error Handling

Error	Action
Ambiguous meter	Ask for OS, term, tier, or usage.
Forecast unavailable	Explain the history requirement.
Pricesheet pending	Honor the returned polling interval.
Multiple currencies	Never combine currencies.
Server error	Retry once; then report the trace ID.

This skill ships inside the Azure Skills Plugin. Listed package contents include hooks and an MCP server. Installed components and skill versions may vary by AI tool.

Run this outside your AI tool, using Node.js 22.20.0 or newer. Skills CLI 1.7.2 skips skill selection; prompts cancel installation without an interactive terminal. If choosing Project when asked about installation scope, open your project's folder before running this.

Install checklist

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Skills CLI 1.7.2 sends install data to skills.sh by default, including the source, skill names, target tools and file details; GitHub sources are reported only when GitHub confirms the repository is public, while other remote sources can also be reported. Confirmed-public GitHub sources also trigger a security-audit request. Before installing, set the environment variable DO_NOT_TRACK=1 or DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1 to disable both.

npx skills add microsoft/azure-skills --skill "cost-estimation" --full-depth

After installing for Claude Code, open it in the installation project if you chose Project; Global makes the skill available across projects on this computer. Once Claude Code loads the skill, its description helps Claude decide when to use it.

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Azure Cost Estimation

Quick Reference

When to Use This Skill

MCP Tools

Workflow

Error Handling

MCP connection required

More skills

MCP keyword matches