Requirements to a priced three-cloud comparison

The challenge

Choosing a cloud usually means pricing one design in one vendor's calculator and estimating the others by hand, so the comparison is neither like for like nor reproducible.

The scenario

An enterprise architect has to recommend a cloud for a new customer-facing application with a managed Postgres database, an EU data-residency requirement and expected growth of about 20% a year, and must show the five-year cost of each option to the CFO.

What goes in

Written requirements

Workload description, availability target, data residency and expected growth.

Comparison weights

How much cost, operational effort and existing skills should count once the hard constraints are met.

What you can ask

Illustrative prompts. Results depend on your own data and are not deterministic.

• “A customer-facing web app with a managed Postgres database, data kept in the EU, 99.9% availability, growing about 20% a year.”Copy
• “Price this on Azure, AWS and GCP and show me the 60-month cost of each.”Copy

How Clearception approaches it

How the work is structured. Each step shows what its output is grounded in.

1. 1

   Structure the requirements

   AI-inferred

   AI turns the written description into requirements and constraints you can review and edit.

2. 2

   Draft a design per cloud

   Recommendation

   A proposed architecture for Azure, AWS and GCP appears on the design graph for the architect to adjust.

3. 3

   Price every component

   Source

   The pricing engine matches each component to the provider's public price list in the chosen region; any meter it cannot match is listed as unresolved.

4. 4

   Forecast 12, 36 and 60 months

   Estimate

   Cost is projected with the stated growth from the stored price rows, so the forecast can be recomputed later.

5. 5

   Apply constraints, then score

   Observed

   Options that break a hard constraint are excluded before the remaining ones are scored on the weights.

What you get

The shape of what comes back — not a promised result.

• Priced bill of components per cloud

  Source

  Each component with its matched price-list row, region and unit price, and a list of anything left unresolved.

• Five-year forecast

  Estimate

  12, 36 and 60-month totals per cloud, marked incomplete wherever a meter could not be priced.

• Side-by-side comparison

  Observed

  Which options met the hard constraints, and how those that did scored on the weights.

Why it matters

Like-for-like comparison

One set of requirements priced on three clouds, instead of three calculators and a spreadsheet.

A forecast that holds up

Every figure traces to a public price-list row and can be reproduced when someone asks how it was reached.