Andrey Kryukov, an executive board member of Kazakhstan's national Olympic body, said Almaty will rely on existing venues — unlike Sochi, which built everything from scratch.
Russia's overall bill for Sochi was $51 billion, a figure that covers direct games costs and long-term regeneration projects for the Black Sea resort region.
"Our budget will be many, many times less than here," Kryukov said at a news conference.
He said Almaty's infrastructure budget is still being finalized but will "compare to the operational budget." Operational budgets for the games usually total around $2-3 billion dollars.
Almaty is competing against Beijing; Krakow, Poland; Lviv, Ukraine; and Oslo, Norway. While Almaty was an outsider for 2014, it shapes up as a serious contender this time, with the other bid cities all facing various disadvantages.
The IOC will select a short list of finalists on July 8-9 and choose the winning city on July 31, 2015.
The Almaty team included Denis Ten, the Kazakh figure skater who won the bronze medal in Sochi.
Like the Sochi Games, Ten said, the Olympics in Almaty would show how "the life of an entire region can be transformed."
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"We have real winter," Kryukov said. "We have state of the art facilities. We have the drive and the ability. What else do we need? We need the games."
