Our company's concept of "cloud" is that you have a large set of servers clustered by Polyserve that have many instances of SQL, and when an app needs a database, they pay for it by a fraction of the cost it originally cost the company to buy the hardware/software and don't care where in the matrix they live. We have a mechanical method of calculating the cost to the project. That sort of thing I can handle. But we stop at the DB and file/backup level. To calculate how much it would cost to add an index is not what I would want to do. What if you reindex? Drop indexes temporarily and readd them? How would you track costs for that? IMO going beneath the database level in calculating charges is too excessive for a DBA to have to deal with.