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About this tool
Plan an AWS, Azure or GCP certification sequence with exam fees, study hours and a week-by-week timeline.
This planner builds an ordered cloud certification sequence — foundational, associate, then professional — for a chosen role on AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, using the providers' published exam fees (AWS $100/$150/$300 by tier, Azure $99/$165, GCP $99/$125/$200) and typical study-hour estimates. Enter your weekly study hours and it lays out which exam to sit in which week, plus the total cost and time to finish the path.
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Add your input to the workspace.
Adjust the options until the result looks right.
Copy or download the output and put it to work.
Exam prices come from each provider's certification page: AWS tiers at $100/$150/$300, Azure at $99/$165, GCP at $99/$125/$200 (standard USD).
Sequences respect real requirements, like AZ-104 before the AZ-305 Solutions Architect Expert badge.
Study hours divide by your weekly availability into concrete exam-week targets you can book against.
Start with the provider's foundational exam — AWS Cloud Practitioner ($100), Azure Fundamentals AZ-900 ($99) or GCP Cloud Digital Leader ($99) — if you are new to cloud, then move to the associate cert for your role. Engineers already working hands-on in a cloud often skip fundamentals and start at associate level, which this planner supports.
AWS exam registration is tiered by level: $100 for the foundational Cloud Practitioner, $150 for associate exams like Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03), and $300 for professional and specialty exams like Solutions Architect Professional (SAP-C02). Prices are USD and AWS emails a 50%-off voucher for your next exam after each pass.
Typical estimates for someone with some IT background are 20–25 hours for a fundamentals exam, 60–75 hours for an associate exam and 85–100 hours for a professional exam. At 8 hours of study a week, a full foundational-to-professional path is roughly five to six months.
Yes — Microsoft awards the Azure Solutions Architect Expert credential only when you have passed AZ-305 plus the Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104) prerequisite. Similarly, the AZ-400 DevOps Engineer Expert badge requires either AZ-104 or AZ-204 first, which is why this planner sequences them that way.