Cost Management

by
Rob Sanfilippo

by
Rob Sanfilippo

Before joining Directions on Microsoft, Rob worked at Microsoft for 14 years where he designed technologies for Microsoft products and... more

Microsoft Cost Management (MCM) is a free service that can help track, budget, forecast, generate alerts on, and optimize Azure spending. It can help find unnecessary spending and help with mapping costs back to projects and business units. Several non-Azure Microsoft offerings that are billed to Azure subscriptions, such as Copilot Credits for agent usage, GitHub Copilot and other metered GitHub services, and Visual Studio subscriptions, can also have their spending tracked and analyzed using MCM.

Product: Cost Management

Near-Term Roadmap (2026–2027)

Cost Management and Pricing tool sets are available within the Azure Resource Manager Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. The tool sets allow AI agents to interact with Azure customers’ spending, budgets, and forecasts provided by MCM.

Long-Term Roadmap (Beyond 2027)

Feature changes to MCM have slowed. There will likely be new AI-based functionality arriving in MCM to help customers understand, analyze, predict, and optimize their Azure spend.