A county CIO is preparing a business case for an AI-powered document-processing initiative and wants a defensible early estimate of ongoing cloud costs to include alongside projected benefits, before any contracts are signed. Which resource is best suited to producing that estimate at this business-case stage?

At the business-case stage, before any contract or specific configuration is finalized, the AWS Pricing Calculator lets a CIO model projected usage patterns for a proposed initiative and generate a cost estimate grounded in the actual service the county intends to use, giving the business case a defensible, purpose-built number rather than a rough proxy. Using the prior-year IT budget as the basis substitutes historical department-wide spending, which reflects an entirely different mix of services and doesn't model the new AI initiative's actual expected usage. Comparing a competing vendor's public price sheet mixes pricing models and service scopes that may not be equivalent, so a listed price alone doesn't produce a reliable estimate for this specific initiative. Applying a general inflation forecast to current costs treats cloud spending as a simple escalation of existing costs, but a new AI initiative introduces new usage patterns an inflation adjustment was never designed to capture. Caveat: a Pricing Calculator estimate is only as accurate as the usage assumptions fed into it, so those assumptions should be documented alongside the estimate. Operational check: confirm the usage inputs used in the estimate are reviewed against the initiative's actual projected document volume before the business case is finalized.