---
title: Show me the money
description: "I think this is the interesting comparison. How did a Tier-1 MS-hosted build VM cost? Around 400€? How does it compare to using the Azure DevTest Labs alternative? There’s only one fix cost when using Azure DevTest Labs: the blob…"
url: "https://ariste.info/dynamics365almguide/show-me-the-money/"
updated: "2024-08-25"
category: Legacy Guide / Azure DevTest Labs powered builds
---

# Show me the money

I think this is the interesting comparison. How did a Tier-1 MS-hosted build VM cost? Around 400€? How does it compare to using the Azure DevTest Labs alternative?

There’s only one fix cost when using Azure DevTest Labs: the blob storage where the VHD is uploaded. The VHD’s size is around 130GB and this should have a cost of, more or less, 5 euros/month. Keep in mind that **you need to clean up your custom images when yours is prepared**, the new ones are created as snapshots and also take space in the storage account.

Then we have the variable costs that come with the deployment of a VM each build but it’s just **absurd**. Imagine we’re using a B4ms VM, with a 256GB Premium SSD disk, we would pay 0.18€/hour for the VM plus the proportional part of 35.26€/month of the SSD disk, which would be like 5 cents/hour?

But this can run on a B2ms VM too which is half the compute price of the VM, down to 9 cents per hour.

If we run this build once a day each month, 30 times, the cost of a B4ms would be like… 7€? Add the blob storage and we’ll be paying **12€ per month to run our builds with DB sync and tests**.

Is it cheaper than deploying a cloud-hosted environment, and starting and stopping it using [the new d365fo.tools Cmdlets](https://github.com/d365collaborative/d365fo.tools) each time we run the build? **Yes it is!** Because if we deploy a CHE we’ll be paying the price of the SSD disk for the whole month!

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