OCI lab: price a workload with the Cost Estimator, check every line by hand, and set a budget before you build

Short answer: Oracle's Cost Estimator is a free public page, with no sign-in, that turns a list of resources into a monthly figure at the current list price. In this lab you price a small two-server web application line by line, land on $100.71 a month (₹9,622.53), and then prove every line with a calculator. Along the way you meet three places where an estimate and an invoice part company, and you finish by putting a budget alert on the real thing. About forty minutes, a browser, and no cloud account until the last step.

The first two labs in this series built things: a bucket with sharing and lifecycle rules, then a compute instance that backs itself up to it. This one answers the question a manager asks before either is approved: what will it cost?

Before you start

• A browser. The estimator lives at oracle.com/cloud/costestimator.html.
• A calculator or a spreadsheet, for the hand check.
• For the last step only, an OCI tenancy and the CLI you set up in lab 2. Without them, read that step now and do it when you have a tenancy.

Every price below was read from the estimator on 10 November 2026; its footer showed price data built on 2 November 2026. Prices change. The method does not.

The units OCI bills in

Almost every line on an OCI bill is a quantity multiplied by one of these.

Two definitions save a lot of confusion.

An OCPU is not a vCPU. An OCPU is a physical core. On AMD and Intel shapes, one OCPU is two vCPUs, so a machine another cloud sells as "4 vCPUs" is 2 OCPUs here. On Arm A1 shapes, one OCPU is one vCPU. Convert before you compare, or OCI will look twice as expensive as it is.

A month is 744 hours. The estimator assumes every resource runs 24 hours a day for 31 days. You can change that, and step 2 shows where.

The workload

A small web application: two application servers behind a load balancer, a data volume, and a bucket for uploads and backups.

Step 1: open the estimator and look around

Open the page. At the top is a currency selector that starts on USD - US Dollar. Leave it there for now, because the hand check is easier in dollars. Under My Estimate are five tabs: Services, Compute shapes, Reference architectures, My favorites and Advanced Search. The running total, Estimated Monthly Cost, sits at the top right and starts at $0.00.

Step 2: add the two servers

1. Select Compute shapes and find VM.Standard.E5.Flex in the list. Select Add.
2. A panel called My Configuration opens with 1 OCPU, 8 GB of memory, on-demand capacity and 1 instance × 744 hrs/month. The compute line reads $34.22.
3. Under Utilization, select Edit. Set Instances to 2 and select Save. The same dialog is where you would enter hours per day and days per month if the servers did not run all month.

The compute line now reads $68.45.

Step 3: fix the boot volume

The same panel has a Boot volume section, and this is the first trap. The estimator fills in a boot volume of 200 GB, which adds $8.50 a month for every instance. The Console, when you actually create an instance, gives it about 50 GB unless you ask for more.

Change Storage capacity [GB] to 50 and leave VPU at 10, which is the Balanced performance level. With two instances the boot volume line reads $4.25, and the configuration $72.70. Ten servers with the default left alone would have overstated the estimate by $63.75 a month.

Step 4: add the data volume and the bucket

1. Select Add configuration, then Services, then Load next to Block Volumes. The preset is 200 GB at 10 VPUs, which is what we want: $8.50.
2. Select Add configuration, Services, and Load next to Object Storage. Set Object Storage - Storage to 500. Set Object Storage - Requests to 100: the unit is 10,000 requests, so 100 means one million. The section reads $12.82.

Step 5: add the load balancer and the traffic

1. Add configuration, Services, Load next to Load Balancer. Set Load Balancer Base to 1 and Load Balancer Bandwidth to 100. The panel tells you that the first flexible load balancer each month is free, and the first 10 Mbps with it. The section reads $6.70.
2. Add configuration, Services, Load next to Virtual Cloud Networks. Under Outbound Data Transfer enter 2000. It stays at $0.00, because the first 10 TB a month is free.

Step 6: read the total

For the rupee column, change the currency selector to INR - Indian Rupee. Every line and every unit price switches to Oracle's rupee list price.

Check every line by hand

An estimate you cannot reproduce is a number you cannot defend. Here is the same total from the unit prices.

Compute     2 servers x 1 OCPU x 744 h x $0.03        = $44.640
            2 servers x 8 GB   x 744 h x $0.002       = $23.808
Boot        100 GB x $0.0255                          =  $2.550
            100 GB x 10 VPU x $0.0017                 =  $1.700
Block       200 GB x $0.0255                          =  $5.100
            200 GB x 10 VPU x $0.0017                 =  $3.400
Object      (500 - 10) GB x $0.0255                   = $12.495
            (100 - 5) units x $0.0034                 =  $0.323
Balancer    first one free                            =  $0.000
            (100 - 10) Mbps x 744 h x $0.0001         =  $6.696
Data out    2,000 GB, inside the free 10 TB           =  $0.000
                                                Total = $100.712

It matches to the cent. When your own hand figure and the estimator disagree, you have found either a price change or a default you did not notice, and both are better found now than on an invoice.

Three places where the estimate and the invoice part company

1. The boot volume default. You met it in step 3. Every compute line you add brings 200 GB with it until you change it.

2. Hours do not apply to disks. Go back to Utilization, select Edit, and enter 10 hours a day and 22 days a month: a server that runs only in office hours. The estimator shows 2 instances × 220 hrs/month and compute falls from ₹6,539.86 to ₹1,933.83. That part is right: Oracle's documentation says that for Standard shapes, stopping an instance pauses billing.

But the boot volume line falls as well, from ₹406.07 to ₹120.07, and the total to ₹4,730.50. A stopped server still has its disk. Oracle's Block Volumes FAQ says volumes are "metered based on the provisioned GB volume size and the performance option selected", and that boot volumes are charged at Block Volume pricing "in addition to the price of the compute instance". Nothing there says the meter stops when the instance does, so add the ₹286.00 back and plan on ₹5,016.50. Note also that the pause applies to Standard shapes: Oracle lists Dense I/O, HPC and most GPU shapes as billed even while stopped.

3. The Arm free allowance, where two official numbers disagree. Add a VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape and set it to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB. That is 2,976 OCPU-hours and 17,856 GB-hours in a 744-hour month, and the estimator prices the compute at ₹0.00, because its price list makes the first 3,000 OCPU-hours and 18,000 GB-hours free. Oracle's Always Free documentation, read the same day, says tenancies get the first 1,500 OCPU-hours and 9,000 GB-hours, which it describes as 2 OCPUs and 12 GB. By that rule the same machine costs:

(2,976 - 1,500) OCPU-hours x $0.01    = $14.760
(17,856 - 9,000) GB-hours  x $0.0015  = $13.284
                                Total = $28.044 a month

We do not know which figure an invoice will follow. When two official numbers disagree, plan on the smaller allowance, and let your first month in Cost Analysis settle it.

Two smaller points from Oracle's own notes. The estimator is for evaluation and is not an official quote. And the cost preview the Console shows when you create an instance covers only the shape, the image and the boot volume, assumes the same 744 hours, and leaves out network traffic.

What Always Free takes off

• In any volume panel, tick Apply 200GB Free Tier Discount. With a single 50 GB boot volume, the line went to $0.00. The allowance is 200 GB for the whole tenancy, boot and block volumes together, so apply it once, not on every volume.
• The first flexible load balancer and its 10 Mbps, the first 10 GB of Object Storage, the first 50,000 requests and the first 10 TB of outbound data are already inside the tiered prices. You subtracted them yourself in the hand check.
• Read Oracle's Always Free page before you rely on any of it. It is also where Oracle says that idle Always Free compute instances may be reclaimed.

Save it and share it

Open the three-dots menu on the estimate.

• Add to Favorites keeps the estimate in your browser. It disappears when you clear your cache, cookies or history, and when you load it again it shows the latest list prices, not the ones you saw.
• Export writes an XLS, CSV or JSON file. Only the JSON can be imported back into the estimator.

So export twice: the JSON to reopen and adjust later, and the XLS or CSV as the dated record of what you were quoted. That pair, with your hand check, is what you hand in for this lab.

After you build: compare, then cap

Once the resources exist, two tools in the Console under Billing & Cost Management take over from the estimator.

Cost Analysis shows what you actually spent. It opens on the Costs by Service report. Group by SKU (Part Number) and the rows line up with the lines of your estimate, which is how you find out which assumption was wrong. Reading it needs this policy:

Allow group <group_name> to read usage-report in tenancy

A budget warns you before the month ends. Budgets are created in the root compartment even when they watch a child compartment, so the policy is at tenancy level:

Allow group <group_name> to use usage-budgets in tenancy

Create the budget on the compartment that holds the application. The amount is in the currency of your tenancy's rate card: about 110 if you are billed in dollars, about 10,500 if in rupees.

oci budgets budget create \
  --compartment-id <tenancy_ocid> \
  --target-type COMPARTMENT \
  --targets '["<compartment_ocid>"]' \
  --amount 110 \
  --reset-period MONTHLY \
  --display-name webapp-monthly

Then add two alert rules, using the budget OCID from the output: one when actual spend reaches 80 percent, one when the forecast says you will go over.

oci budgets alert-rule create \
  --budget-id <budget_ocid> \
  --type ACTUAL \
  --threshold 80 \
  --threshold-type PERCENTAGE \
  --recipients "<your_email>" \
  --display-name spent-80-percent

oci budgets alert-rule create \
  --budget-id <budget_ocid> \
  --type FORECAST \
  --threshold 100 \
  --threshold-type PERCENTAGE \
  --recipients "<your_email>" \
  --display-name forecast-over-budget

The forecast is a straight line: spend so far, divided by the days elapsed, multiplied by the days in the period. It needs at least three days of spending before it can fire. Oracle's task page prints these commands with an extra budget in them; the CLI reference uses the form above, and oci budgets budget create --help settles it on your version.

One thing a budget is not: a brake. Oracle calls it a soft limit. It sends an email and stops nothing, so somebody still has to read the alert and act.

What you can now say in an interview

You can price a workload before it is built and reproduce every line of the estimate by hand. You can convert vCPUs to OCPUs, explain why 744 appears on every estimate, and name three ways an estimate goes wrong: a default nobody changed, hours applied to disks, and a free allowance taken on trust. And you can put a budget with an actual and a forecast alert on a compartment and say honestly what it does and does not do. Cloud administrators are asked "what will this cost?" far more often than they are asked to build anything.

If you did this lab and want the rest of the platform taught the same way, with a mentor checking your work, the OCI program covers compute, networking, IAM, database and storage over live sessions, and the Multi Cloud Administrator program does the same across OCI, AWS and Azure. Working professionals who want the automation side will find it in the Cloud + DevOps program. Ask us for a call and a counsellor will tell you which fits.

Where the numbers come from

• Oracle Cloud Cost Estimator, used on 10 November 2026 (price data build of 2 November 2026): every dollar and rupee figure, the 200 GB boot volume default, the behaviour of the Utilization and Free Tier options, and the Arm A1 result.
• Oracle's price list feed, updated 2 November 2026: the unit prices in the first table, including the free tiers for Object Storage, load balancers, Arm A1 compute and outbound data.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation, Estimating Monthly Costs: the estimator's tabs, favorites, export and import, the "evaluation purposes only" note, and what the Console's cost preview includes.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation, Always Free Resources: the Arm A1 allowance of 1,500 OCPU-hours and 9,000 GB-hours, the 200 GB of volume storage, the default boot volume of about 50 GB, 10 TB of outbound data, and reclamation of idle instances.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation, Compute Shapes and Resource Billing for Stopped Instances: OCPUs and vCPUs, and which shapes stop billing when stopped.
• Oracle, Block Volumes FAQ: how block and boot volumes are metered and charged.
• Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation, Cost Analysis, Budgets, Creating a Budget and Creating a Budget Alert Rule, and the OCI CLI source for the budget commands: policies, the soft limit, the forecast formula and the command options.

Frequently asked questions