Skills

Skill 2 of 47

Cost Estimation

Forecast Azure spend and price planned resources or workloads.

1 minute · 135 words · 6 sections

Install

$ npx skills add microsoft/azure-skills --skill cost-estimation

$ npx skills add microsoft/azure-skills

» /plugin marketplace add microsoft/azure-skills

The first command installs just this skill, by the name in its SKILL.md; the second installs the whole repository.

Azure Cost Estimation

Quick Reference

Intent	Workflow	Primary tools
Forecast existing spend	Cost forecast (opens in a new tab)	`forecast_costs`
Price planned resources	Pricing estimate (opens in a new tab)	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 (opens in a new tab).

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.

About this skill

Trigger

Forecast Azure spend and price planned resources or workloads. WHEN: "forecast Azure spending", "project next month cost", "compare forecast to my planning target", "how much will Azure cost", "estimate VM cost", "compare storage tiers", "compare Azure regions", "retail price", "EA rate card", "negotiated pricesheet". DO NOT USE FOR: configured budget health or alerts, bill analysis, cost spikes, rightsizing, or commitments.

The verbatim description from this skill’s front matter — the string an agent matches on to decide whether to load it.

Licence: MIT
Source: .github/plugins/azure-cost/skills/cost-estimation/SKILL.md

Colophon for this issue

Colophon

How this issue was made

Source

github.com/microsoft/azure-skills, branch main, last pushed 23 September 2026.

Licence

MIT — the text of every skill is reproduced unmodified, frontmatter included, under the upstream licence.

Discovery

47 skills found by walking the repository tree for SKILL.md, not by matching a directory convention. 10 distinct layouts observed: .github/plugins/azure-cost/skills/*/SKILL.md, .github/plugins/azure-kusto-graph-skills/skills/*/SKILL.md, .github/plugins/azure-local-skills/skills/*/SKILL.md, .github/plugins/foundry-iq-skills/skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/*/SKILL.md, skills/azure-app-onboard/*/SKILL.md, skills/azure-kubernetes/*/SKILL.md, skills/microsoft-foundry/*/SKILL.md, skills/microsoft-foundry/models/deploy-model/*/SKILL.md, skills/microsoft-foundry/models/*/SKILL.md.

Duplicates collapsed

37 mirror copies folded into their canonical skill — republished for GitHub. Copies match on content hash and on position once a leading per-agent prefix is stripped, because the same skill is routinely shipped under a dozen agent directories with a dozen different hashes.

Issue colours

Resolved from a curated brand profile — hue 251°, chroma 0.167. Two accent tones are generated per issue and each is proven against its own ground before it ships: a single accent that passes AA on both light and dark paper is arithmetically impossible.

Heading repairs

1 repair applied to this skill so the document has one h1 and no skipped levels:

Shifted “6 headings” from h1 to h2 so the skill title is the only h1.

Spec compliance

6 editorial notes across 3 of 47 skills. They are printed in the margin of each skill rather than as errors here.

Deploy — 2 notes
Prepare — 2 notes
Scaffold — 2 notes

Images

Images inside a skill come from the upstream repository. Where the author gave no alternative text we mark the image decorative rather than inventing a description — a plausible caption we made up is worse than none for the reader who depends on it.

Marketplace

A plugin manifest is published at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json by Microsoft, declaring 5 plugins. It is read for editorial metadata only — never as the skill index, which is always the repository tree.

Signal

Install counts come from skills.sh. They measure downloads, not quality, and an unranked repository is not an unread one.

Agent surfaces

The whole issue is available as one markdown document at /microsoft/azure-skills.md, and each skill at its own .md URL.

Publication

Set by Skills Docs from the source repository. Body text is Literata at the reader’s chosen size and measure; code is Geist Mono. Nothing on this page was written by us except this paragraph.

Azure Cost Estimation

Quick Reference

Intent	Workflow	Primary tools
Forecast existing spend	Cost forecast (opens in a new tab)	`forecast_costs`
Price planned resources	Pricing estimate (opens in a new tab)	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 (opens in a new tab).

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.

Cost Estimation

Azure Cost Estimation

Quick Reference

When to Use This Skill

MCP Tools

Workflow

Error Handling

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon

Cost Estimation

Azure Cost Estimation

Quick Reference

When to Use This Skill

MCP Tools

Workflow

Error Handling

Appendix 2.1–2.7

ReferencesMarkdown · 7 files

About this skill

Trigger

Colophon

Appendix 2.1–2.7

ReferencesMarkdown · 7 files