Factors that affect cost

Azure bills you for what you use, but what you use, where, and how you buy it all change the price.

Factors that affect cost

Resource type. Every service has its own pricing. A storage account's cost depends on its type, performance tier, access tier and redundancy; a VM's on its size, operating system and licensing.

Consumption. Pay-as-you-go charges for what you use. Using more costs more; deallocating a VM stops its compute charges (its disks are still billed).

Reservations and savings plans. Committing to use a resource for one or three years (Azure Reservations) gives a large discount compared with pay-as-you-go, for steady workloads. A savings plan for compute commits to an hourly spend instead, and keeps the discount when you change VM size or region.

Maintenance. Resources you no longer need still cost money. A deleted VM can leave behind disks, public IP addresses and network interfaces that keep billing. Cleaning up regularly saves money.

Geography (region). The same resource can cost a different amount in different regions, because power, labour and taxes differ.

Network traffic (bandwidth). Data coming into Azure (ingress) is generally free. Data leaving Azure (egress) and data moving between regions is charged, with prices that depend on the zone.

Subscription type. Some subscriptions include usage allowances, such as the free account (12 months of popular services, a credit for the first 30 days, and services that are always free up to a limit).

Azure Marketplace. Solutions bought from third-party vendors in the Marketplace include the vendor's charges on top of Azure's.

Ways to save

• Azure Reservations for predictable workloads, or a savings plan when usage shifts between sizes and regions.
• Spot VMs for interruptible work, at deep discounts.
• Dev/Test pricing: discounted rates for development and test subscriptions (for Visual Studio subscribers).
• Azure Hybrid Benefit: reuse existing Windows Server and SQL Server licences with Software Assurance in Azure, so you do not pay for them twice.
• Right-size resources: smaller VMs if they are underused (Azure Advisor helps spot these).
• Deallocate or delete what you are not using; use autoscaling and schedules.