Cost and Time Model¶
Use this page to compare the published budget and deployment window for each Practical Journey stage before you choose which one to run.
Stage estimates¶
| Stage | Trigger | Cost | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stage 1 — MVP | "We need a real public web app online this week." | ~$0.09–$0.13/hour | 20–30 min |
| Stage 2 — Production Baseline | "The app now matters to the business." | ~$0.14–$0.20/hour | 25–40 min |
| Stage 3 — Scale / Edge | "Traffic is growing and internet exposure is a concern." | ~$0.20–$0.30/hour | 35–50 min |
| Stage 4 — Network Isolation | "Compliance requires private data access." | ~$0.24–$0.36/hour | 35–55 min |
| Stage 5 — Resilience | "Business needs regional outage tolerance." | ~$0.45–$0.80/hour | 50–75 min |
| Total (sum of published stage estimates) | Full sequential walkthrough across all five stages | ~$1.12–$1.79/hour | 165–250 min |
How to read the total¶
- The time total is a straight sum of the five published deployment windows: 165–250 minutes.
- The cost total is the straight sum of the five published hourly estimates: ~$1.12–$1.79/hour.
- In practice, most readers deploy one stage at a time, verify it, and destroy it before moving on. In that common flow, your live hourly burn is the cost of the currently running stage, not the sum of all five.
Choosing the right stage¶
Use the trigger sentence as the primary selector:
- Pick Stage 1 when delivery speed matters more than production hardening.
- Pick Stage 2 when secrets, release safety, and alerting can no longer wait.
- Pick Stage 3 when internet exposure and scale behavior are now production concerns.
- Pick Stage 4 when the data path must move behind private networking.
- Pick Stage 5 when regional outage tolerance becomes a real business requirement.
Destroy instructions¶
Each stage tears down through the same driver script shape:
scripts/practical/destroy-stage.sh stage-01
scripts/practical/destroy-stage.sh stage-02
scripts/practical/destroy-stage.sh stage-03
scripts/practical/destroy-stage.sh stage-04
scripts/practical/destroy-stage.sh stage-05
The destroy script deletes the stage resource group with --yes --no-wait, so Azure removes the resources asynchronously in the background.
Practical budgeting advice¶
The stage costs are intentionally progressive: every later stage buys down an additional production risk. Treat the earlier stages as learning and baseline checkpoints, not as sunk cost you must keep running forever.