Azure VM Costs Explained

Multiple factors contribute to the overall cost of running workloads within Azure VMs, including charges related to compute time, use of Windows Server, or a Linux distribution with run-time costs, server application use, and consumption of other resources, such as storage and networking. Customers may be able to substantially reduce the charges for some of these components if they have active Software Assurance (SA) for on-premises server licenses or are willing to make certain types of Azure purchase commitments upfront.

By default, most charges related to Azure VMs are billed under an hourly pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model. Azure prices quoted below are for the West US 2 region and based on the standard Azure calculation of a 730-hour month. Prices were extracted from Microsoft’s Azure Pricing Calculator page (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?service=virtual-machines) on Oct. 4, 2018, and represent the highest price a U.S.-based volume licensing customer would pay for the services (for example, prices do not reflect additional discounts that large Enterprise Agreement customers usually receive).