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 the size of the work: how much there is to build, how much is already there, and what has to be sorted out first. So there is no figure to publish that would be true of the next engagement, and the quote you get is for your work rather than for an average.
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.
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 what you have is already live and the bill has crept up, reading it against what the application actually used is a piece of work on its own. Ask about your bill, or bring it to the review.
Twenty minutes, and nothing to prepare.
Tell me what you need built or fixed, and I'll tell you where I'd start.