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Pricing guide, Cloud Infrastructure
The four units that move most Azure bills, what a reservation saves on a fixed fleet, and the support step that costs ten times the plan below it.
The short answer
Azure has no list plan, and you pay per unit. In East US, a D4s v5 Linux VM is USD 0.1920 an hour pay as you go, Blob Hot storage is USD 0.018 to USD 0.023 per GB a month and internet egress is USD 0.087 per GB after 100 GB free. Twenty D4s v5 VMs running all year cost USD 33,638.
Written by Procurement VMS Editorial Team · Reviewed by Michael, Procurement Advisor Expert · Price data dated · 10 minute read
Azure bills like a utility meter and not like software. There is no plan to pick, no seat count to agree and no single number for a budget line. You pay for the hours, gigabytes and transactions your engineers consume, at rates Microsoft publishes and few people read.
This guide prices the four units that move an Azure bill for most companies: virtual machines, Blob Storage, a managed SQL database and egress. It then covers the two decisions that set the total, whether you committed and which support plan you carry.
Prices below were recorded on 17 October 2026. The headline figure is the lowest price you can get for that plan. Check the official page before you buy, because vendors change prices without notice.
USD0.0758 per hour (3 year reserved)
per unit, varies by service, billed yearly
Billed monthly: USD0.1920 per hour
Best for: General purpose application and web servers
Reserved capacity available, rate not published
per unit, varies by service, billed yearly
Billed monthly: USD0.018 to USD 0.023 per GB-month
Best for: Active data read frequently
Reserved capacity saves roughly 30% to 40% on 1 year terms
per unit, varies by service, billed yearly
Billed monthly: About USD 0.252 per vCore hour
Best for: Managed relational databases
USD0.087 per GB
per unit, varies by service
Best for: Anything your users download
How billing works
Azure has no plan to choose and no single list price, so totals depend on usage. Virtual Machines bill per hour of runtime, Blob Storage bills per GB held in volume bands with operations charged per 10,000 transactions, Azure SQL Database bills compute per vCore hour with storage separate, and egress bills per GB after the first 100 GB a month. Reservations and the Azure savings plan for compute are separate 1 or 3 year commitments that apply to matching usage and not to a named subscription. Microsoft states savings of up to 72% on a 3-year reservation and as much as 65% on a 3-year savings plan. Support is charged on top. Basic is included for all customers, Developer is USD 29 a month, Standard is USD 100 a month and Professional Direct is USD 1,000 a month, with Unified Enterprise quoted separately. Storage tiers carry early deletion periods of 30 days for Cool, 90 days for Cold and 180 days for Archive.
The tier trap
Professional Direct support is the jump that catches teams. It costs USD 1,000 a month against Standard at USD 100, a tenfold increase, and it is usually bought for the response time and not for anything in the product.
Read this first. Medium confidence. Support plan prices, internet egress tiers and the reservation and savings plan percentages were read on official Azure pages on 17 October 2026. The Blob Storage pricing page shows placeholder prices and the Azure Retail Prices API was not reachable, so Blob per-GB figures are a 2026-dated third-party range and Azure SQL figures come from a September 2026 third-party article that calls them approximations. D4s v5 rates, including the reservation and savings plan rates, come from a reference page dated 16 October 2026 and not from Microsoft. The Azure free account credit amount was not verified. Replace the Blob and SQL figures with the official calculator before you budget.
Move the slider to see what each plan costs at your size. The figures use the list prices on this page and leave out tax, add-ons and any discount you negotiate.
Twenty VMs running all year show what a reservation saves and what a support step adds.
| Scenario | Cost per year | Against the headline |
|---|---|---|
| 20 D4s v5 VMs pay as you go, running 24/7 for a year | USD33,638 | Headline price |
| Same 20 VMs on a 3 year reservation at USD 0.0758 an hour | USD13,280 | -USD 20,358 |
| 20 D4s v5 pay as you go plus Professional Direct support at USD 1,000 a month | USD45,638 | +USD 12,000 |
Compare the plans side by side. Where a cell says Check page, the vendor's pricing page was not specific enough for us to fill it in.
| Purchase option | Pay as you go | 1 year reserved | 3 year reserved | 3 year savings plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D4s v5 hourly, East US | USD 0.1920 | USD 0.1185 | USD 0.0758 | USD 0.0884 |
| Reported saving versus pay as you go | 0% | 38% | 61% | 54% |
| Commitment | None | 1 year | 3 years | 3 years |
| Annual cost, 20 VMs | USD 33,638 | USD 20,761 | USD 13,280 | USD 15,488 |
Features we could not place by plan: Locked to a specific VM series. Check the official page for which plan includes each one.
Pick it if the workload is new, seasonal or heading for a rebuild inside a year.
Pick it if your total compute spend is steady but the VM series and regions will keep changing.
Pick it if you are confident about the VM series for a year but not for three.
Pick it for a genuinely fixed estate, where USD 0.0758 an hour against USD 0.1920 is worth the lock-in.
Our view
Azure is the rational choice when your estate is already Microsoft, because existing licenses and identity carry over and the commercial relationship is in place. On raw compute rate it is the most expensive of the three big clouds in this comparison, so the case for Azure is rarely the instance price. It is everything attached to it.
You may be overpaying if
You run a fixed estate on pay-as-you-go rates with no reservation or savings plan, you hold Professional Direct support on a small subscription, or you serve large downloads straight out of Blob Storage with no CDN.
D4s v5 drops from USD 0.1920 to USD 0.0758 an hour on a 3-year reservation, which is USD 20,358 a year on 20 VMs.
The 3-year savings plan at USD 0.0884 an hour still saves 54% without locking you to one VM series.
Standard at USD 100 a month covers production workloads for most teams. Professional Direct at USD 1,000 a month is a USD 10,800 a year decision.
Blob Hot at USD 0.018 to USD 0.023 per GB against Archive at about USD 0.00099 per GB is a large gap, provided you respect the 180-day early deletion period.
Azure SQL serverless bills USD 0 compute while paused and only keeps billing storage, which suits development and reporting databases.
AWS m5.large at USD 0.0960 an hour and Google Cloud c4-standard-2 at USD 0.096866 an hour are useful reference points when you negotiate an enterprise agreement.
Renewal email you can copy
Fill in the brackets and send it about 90 days before the renewal date. It works best next to your renewal tracker.
Subject: Microsoft Azure renewal on [renewal date] Hi [account manager], Our Microsoft Azure [plan] subscription renews on [renewal date]. Over the last 90 days, [active d4s v5 virtual machines running 24/7] of the [paid d4s v5 virtual machines running 24/7] we pay for used it. We would like to renew with [target d4s v5 virtual machines running 24/7] on a [term] term. Before we sign, please send: 1. The current list price and the price you are offering us, line by line. 2. The cap on any price increase at the next renewal. 3. The notice period if we want to cut d4s v5 virtual machines running 24/7 or move to another plan. We are comparing this against [alternative] and plan to decide by [decision date]. If you can offer [target discount] percent off list, or a lower price for a longer term, we are ready to talk this week. Thank you, [name] [company]
Free PDF and Excel
A one page summary of every plan, plus an Excel model that adds up your own seat count.
If this vendor does not fit, these are the closest options and what they charge.
| Alternative | Starting price | Pick it when |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | USD0.0960 per hour (m5.large, us-east-1, on demand) | You want the widest service catalogue and deepest third-party tooling Read our Amazon Web Services pricing guide |
| Google Cloud | USD0.096866 per hour (c4-standard-2, us-central1, on demand) | You want flexible committed use discounts and strong data and analytics tooling |
| DigitalOcean | USD126 per month (General Purpose Droplet, 4 vCPU, 16 GiB) | You run a small fixed fleet and want a flat, predictable bill Read our DigitalOcean pricing guide |
Cloud estates grow without purchase orders. Put the reservation expiry, support plan and enterprise agreement date on a calendar with an owner.
Bottom line. Reserve the fixed base, size support to the subscription, and tier cold data before you pay for it. Put reservation expiry and the enterprise agreement date on a calendar with an owner.
A D4s v5 Linux VM with 4 vCPU and 16 GiB in East US is USD 0.1920 an hour pay as you go, about USD 140.16 a month. It falls to USD 0.1185 an hour on a 1-year reservation and USD 0.0758 an hour on a 3-year reservation.
Yes. Azure includes 100 GB of free internet egress each month plus always-free service tiers, and new accounts get a starting credit. The current credit amount could not be verified on the official pages for this guide.
Microsoft publishes Developer at USD 29 a month, Standard at USD 100 and Professional Direct at USD 1,000. Basic support is included for all Azure customers. Unified Enterprise support is not published on the plan page and is quoted separately.
Yes. Microsoft states Reserved VM Instances save up to 72% on a 3-year term and the Azure savings plan for compute cuts compute costs by as much as 65%. Azure Hybrid Benefit and enterprise agreements add further discounts.
Yes, where usage is steady. Moving 20 D4s v5 VMs from USD 0.1920 to USD 0.0758 an hour on a 3-year reservation takes the annual bill from USD 33,638 to USD 13,280, a saving of USD 20,358. A 1-year reservation at USD 0.1185 an hour costs USD 20,761 a year for the same 20 VMs.
For simple fixed workloads, DigitalOcean is cheapest, with a 4 vCPU and 16 GiB General Purpose Droplet at USD 126 a month. Among full platforms, AWS m5.large at USD 0.0960 an hour and Google Cloud c4-standard-2 at USD 0.096866 an hour both undercut D4s v5.
We start from the vendor pricing page and note the date. Where a figure comes from a third party instead, we say so on the page. Procurement VMS is a ratings and comparison site, not a software vendor, and nobody paid for a place in this guide. Spot a number that has changed? Tell us on the contact page and we will check it.
You get a one page PDF and an Excel model with your seat count, the plans above and a renewal checklist.
Choosing software instead of renewing? See the ranked procurement software list.
