cost-modeling

name	cost-modeling
description	Model solution costs — cloud infrastructure, licensing, personnel, and total cost of ownership analysis
allowed-tools	["Read","Write","Grep"]
effort	medium

When to activate

• Estimating total cost of ownership (TCO) for proposed solutions
• Comparing build vs buy costs for architectural decisions
• Creating cloud cost projections for solution proposals
• Optimizing existing solution costs through right-sizing

When NOT to use

• For personal financial planning
• For simple pricing page calculations
• For procurement negotiations

Instructions

1. Inventory components. List all infrastructure, services, licenses, and personnel needed.
2. Estimate usage. Project traffic, storage, compute requirements at launch and at scale.
3. Model costs. Use provider pricing calculators. Include data transfer, API calls, support tiers.
4. Compare options. Build vs buy, different providers, different architectures.
5. Present TCO. 3-year projection with growth assumptions. Include hidden costs (migration, training, maintenance).
6. Optimize. Identify reserved instances, spot opportunities, right-sizing candidates.

Example

Solution Cost Model: Microservices migration

Year 1:
  Compute (EKS):     $8,400/mo → $100,800/yr
  Database (RDS):    $3,200/mo → $38,400/yr
  Storage (S3):      $800/mo → $9,600/yr
  Data transfer:     $1,200/mo → $14,400/yr
  Monitoring:        $600/mo → $7,200/yr
  Personnel (0.5 SRE): $90,000/yr
  Total Year 1: $260,400

Year 3 (at 5x scale):
  Total: $580,000/yr (with reserved instances: $490,000/yr)

vs Monolith (current): $180,000/yr (hitting scaling limits at ~10x)