Windows Licence Cost Calculator

Work out windows licence cost instantly with clear inputs, formula shown and shareable results.

About Windows Licence Cost Calculator

Windows in the cloud can be licensed two ways. Licence-included pricing adds an hourly premium per vCPU and requires no licence management, while bring-your-own uses existing agreements with software assurance and is charged per physical core. BYOL usually wins for steady always-on workloads and loses for intermittent ones, since the licence is paid regardless of runtime.

Formula

Windows licensing

licence-included = instances x vCPUs x hourly premium x 8760; BYOL = instances x ceil(vCPUs / 2) x annual per-core cost

Worked example

With the default values below, Windows Licence Cost Calculator returns Lower-cost licensing route of Bring your own licence is lower cost. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Windows instancesminimum 1: 40
vCPUs per instanceminimum 1: 8
Licence-included hourly premium per vCPUminimum 0: 0.046
Bring-your-own-licence annual cost per coreminimum 0: 220

Results

Lower-cost licensing route: Bring your own licence is lower cost
Licence-included annual cost: $128,947.20
Bring-your-own-licence annual cost: $35,200.00
Annual difference: $93,747.20

Step by step

1Values used
2Windows licensing
3Lower-cost licensing route= Bring your own licence is lower cost
4Licence-included annual cost= 128,947.20
5Bring-your-own-licence annual cost= 35,200.00
6Annual difference= 93,747.20

Assumptions and limits

The result is derived only from the 4 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
In particular, this calculator does not take inflation or tax into account.
Figures are rounded for display to 2 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does BYOL require dedicated hosts?

For some products and licence types, yes. Dedicated host requirements change the economics substantially because you pay for the whole host regardless of utilisation.

What about SQL Server?

It is licensed separately and is usually far more expensive than the operating system. The same licence-included versus BYOL comparison applies but with much larger numbers.