Cloud Migration Cost Guide: What San Antonio Businesses Should Expect

May 19, 2025

What Does Cloud Migration Actually Cost?

One of the first questions San Antonio business owners ask when considering a move to the cloud is simple: how much? The answer depends on your current setup, but we can break down the typical cost categories so you know what to plan for.

The good news is that moving to Azure eliminates the large capital expenditure of buying and maintaining servers. The trade-off is a shift to predictable monthly operating costs — which, for most SMBs, ends up being significantly less than what they were spending on-premises.

Cost Categories to Plan For

Assessment and Planning

Before anything moves, your environment needs to be documented and mapped. This includes inventorying servers, applications, databases, and their dependencies. For a typical San Antonio SMB with 5–20 servers, expect this phase to take 1–2 weeks of professional services time.

Azure Infrastructure

Your monthly Azure spend will depend on:

Virtual Machines — A standard B-series VM for a small application server runs $30–$80/month. Production workloads on D-series VMs range from $100–$400/month.
Storage — Azure Blob Storage starts at a few dollars per month for typical SMB data volumes. Managed disks for VMs add $5–$50/month each depending on size and performance tier.
Networking — VPN Gateway for secure connectivity runs $30–$140/month. Data egress charges are typically under $50/month for most SMBs.
Azure SQL Database — Managed database services start around $30/month for basic tiers, scaling up based on performance needs.

Migration Execution

The hands-on work of moving workloads, reconfiguring networking, testing applications, and cutting over production systems. This is where professional expertise saves you from costly mistakes — misconfigured security groups, data loss during transfer, or extended downtime that impacts your customers.

Post-Migration Optimization

After migration, there’s a 30–60 day period of monitoring and right-sizing. Most businesses discover they over-provisioned initially and can scale down, reducing monthly costs by 20–30%.

Hidden Costs to Watch For

Licensing — Some on-premises software licenses don’t transfer to the cloud. Azure Hybrid Benefit can offset this for Windows Server and SQL Server licenses you already own.
Training — Your team needs to understand the new environment. Budget for basic Azure administration training.
Temporary parallel costs — During migration, you’ll briefly run both on-premises and cloud environments simultaneously.
Egress charges — Data leaving Azure costs money. A well-architected solution minimizes unnecessary data transfer.

Why Human Expertise Matters Here

Cloud cost calculators exist — Microsoft even provides one for Azure. But a calculator can’t tell you which migration strategy minimizes your total cost of ownership. It can’t identify which workloads should be refactored versus lifted-and-shifted. And it definitely can’t spot the compliance gaps that could result in fines far exceeding your migration budget.

AI tools can help estimate costs, but they don’t understand your specific business context: your growth plans, your seasonal traffic patterns, your compliance obligations, or your team’s technical capabilities.

A Realistic Budget Range

For a San Antonio SMB with 5–15 servers and standard business applications:

Migration project cost: $10,000–$40,000 depending on complexity
Monthly Azure spend: $500–$3,000 depending on workload
Annual savings vs. on-premises: 20–40% in most cases, once optimized

Next Steps

The best way to get an accurate estimate is to start with an assessment of your current environment. We’ll map your workloads, identify the optimal migration path, and give you a concrete budget before any work begins.

← Back to Blog