How Much Does Microsoft Azure Cost?

Microsoft make the Azure pricing look simple, but its actually difficult to work out how much Azure is going to cost you once you put your development server into production. Why is Azure pricing difficult to calculate? Because their calculator suggest (guesses) how much Azure will cost you based purely on compute resource. Microsoft Azure’s calculator infers that the charge is based around what category of server you select, but storage I/O and bandwidth used will also affect your costs – something that they don’t show you on the new Azure calculator.

Here’s how to work out how much Azure costs:

1. First off, check out the Azure calculator to get a guess that assumes you don’t use much bandwidth.
2. Next, take a look at the hard to find data charges.
3. Finally, load up a free trial of Azure, then click on Subscriptions, then click on your free trial, then click on Manage at the top. This will give you a breakdown of costs. Try to replicate the effect of 10 users (or as many as you can), then see how much your costs are for that day, then multiply it by the number of users you expect to get in a production environment.

It won’t give the exact cost, but hopefully it will help estimate it.