Pricing - Clear pricing, no surprises
There are two costs to plan for: my fee for the work, and what your cloud provider charges to host the app. Azure is what I use by default. Here is how both work.
What I charge
A fixed price for the work, agreed before any of it starts, and it does not move once agreed. Not an hourly rate, so an afternoon that turns out harder than it looked is my problem rather than a bigger invoice.
What it costs depends on how much there is to set up: how many parts your app has, which rules apply, and what has to be fixed first. So the published figures are where a service starts, and the quote you get is for your app.
A deployment is paid in milestones, and you approve each one before the next begins. Ongoing work is billed monthly and you can stop at the end of any month. Anything outside what was agreed is priced and shown to you before it is started, never after.
Some of it is quoted rather than published, because the work genuinely varies: a monthly figure that fits one app would be wrong for most people reading it. See what each service costs →
What cloud hosting costs
Your cloud provider bills you directly, not me, and you only pay for what your app uses. It is a monthly cost rather than a one-off, and it stays steady unless your usage changes.
I pick the cheapest setup that does what your app needs, so you are not paying for capacity you will never use.
The written plan you approve at the first milestone names every service you will be billed for. Put those names into your cloud provider’s own pricing calculator and you will see the monthly figure before you commit to anything.
If your app is already live and the bill has crept up instead, that is a Cloud Cost Review rather than a deployment.
Twenty minutes, and no pitch.
I'll tell you what I'd fix first in what you've built, and why. No pitch.