MCM-42 — Pre-Provisioning Cost Estimation
Overview and shared context for estimating cloud cost before infrastructure is provisioned across AWS and Azure.
MCM-42 — Pre-Provisioning Cost Estimation
Today, a Platform Engineer can review exactly which resources a workspace's planned infrastructure change will add, modify, or destroy before applying it — but not what that change will cost. Cost only becomes visible after the fact, once real cloud spend has been incurred and later shows up in the platform's existing cost and forecast views. This initiative attaches a cost estimate to that existing pre-apply plan review, using each provider's own public on-demand list prices, so the financial impact of a change is visible before it's committed to — across AWS and Azure resources in the same workspace.
Each user story below is a self-contained page with its own acceptance criteria, technical design, and UI changes. This page holds only what's shared across all of them.
Personas
| Persona | Role | Primary concern |
|---|---|---|
| Platform Engineer | Builds and provisions cloud infrastructure through the platform's workspace/plan/apply flow, and explores hypothetical costs before deciding what to build | Knowing the financial impact of a change before committing to it, not after — whether that change is a real plan or a hypothetical one they're still shaping |
System Context
The pricing engine is self-hosted and open-source: it holds its own price catalogue, refreshed on a schedule directly from each provider's public pricing data, and requires no account, API key, or fee from any external pricing vendor. It has two independent entry points with two different provider scopes: the existing plan output the platform already produces for the pre-apply change preview, scoped to AWS and Azure since that's what the platform can actually provision (no new provisioning-time data needed to price a plan); and direct, ad-hoc queries from the standalone Cost Calculator, which isn't tied to any workspace or plan and can draw on whichever providers the catalogue covers — today that also includes GCP, and a single Calculator estimate can mix resources from more than one provider.
User Stories
| Story | Summary |
|---|---|
| MCM-43 — Estimated Cost Before Applying a Workspace Plan | See a per-resource and total cost estimate on the existing plan review screen, before Apply. |
| MCM-44 — Cloud Cost Calculator | Build a multi-resource cost estimate from scratch, independent of any workspace or plan. |
Out of Scope
- Blocking or gating the Apply action based on the estimated cost, or comparing it against an organization's configured budget — this initiative is informational only; budget enforcement is a separate future initiative.
- Cost estimation for a full workspace teardown/destroy flow — this initiative covers the pre-apply plan step only.
- Cloud providers beyond AWS and Azure for the plan-level estimate (MCM-43) — that estimate matches what the platform can actually provision; the Cost Calculator (MCM-44) is not limited this way.
- Reserved Instance, Savings Plan, or any organization-negotiated discount pricing — every estimate in this initiative reflects on-demand list price only, not an organization's actual contracted rate.
- Turning a Cost Calculator estimate directly into a provisionable workspace or stack — the calculator is a standalone estimation tool for this iteration, not an entry point into actual provisioning.
- Saving, exporting, or sharing a Cost Calculator estimate beyond the current session.
MCM-39 — Clean Logout
Logging out ends both the gateway session and the Keycloak SSO session, so shared machines don't retain access.
MCM-43 — Estimated Cost Before Applying a Workspace Plan
A Platform Engineer sees an estimated cost for a workspace's planned infrastructure changes before applying them.