Cloud Computing: Why Is My Azure Bill So High? — 7 Pricing Traps That No One Warned You About

Did you know Azure’s pricing model is like a polite waiter who never tells you how much the specials cost — until you see the check and start sweating? This isn’t another dry Azure pricing guide. This is the stuff real people wish they knew — before getting slapped with a surprise invoice.

1. Storage: The Real Money Is in the Fine Print (and the Egress Fees)

You think you’re only paying for stored data. You’re paying for replication, read/write operations, and data leaving Azure (egress).

Got GRS or RA-GRS enabled? Congrats—you’re now paying for data stored twice (or more), plus the bandwidth used to sync it across regions.

Common trap: Blob storage defaults to read-access geo-redundant (RA-GRS). For most dev/test workloads, you don’t need it. Switch to LRS unless you need multi-region resilience.

Egress charges apply even between Azure regions. Is your West Europe function app pulling from the East US blob? You’re paying for that data trip.

2. Azure Monitor: Free… Until You Use It

Azure Monitor and Log Analytics start off looking free. Then you turn on diagnostics, insights, and alerts — and suddenly, you’re staring at GBs of log data.

5 GB/month of Log Analytics is free.
After that, you’re billed per GB per day.
Retention beyond 31 days? Also charged.

One team conducted full diagnostics for every Azure Function, App Service, and AKS node. By the end of the month, they had $750 in logs, most of which weren’t even actionable.

Log what matters. Use sampling. Set log retention rules and alerts on ingestion spikes.

3. Virtual Machines: Deallocated, ≠ Stopped, Paying

“I stopped the VM. Why am I still getting billed?” Because “stopped” ≠ “deallocated” unless you shut it down from the Azure Portal.

Stopped from inside the OS? Azure still reserves the hardware and charges you for compute.

Disks and IPs don’t go away when the VM is gone. They keep quietly billing you.

Check Resource Groups for “orphaned” disks or public IPs. Clean up what you’re not using.

4. App Services: That Always-On Checkbox Costs More Than You Think

App services are cheap, right? Until you enable Always On (which is required for background tasks like queue processing or timers).

Also, scaling to more instances? Auto-scaling won’t tell you about the extra charges. You only feel it at the end of the month.

If you’re using premium SKUs (for VNET integration, for example), pricing jumps massively, and you might not need all that power.

Avoid defaulting to Premium just for “performance.” Most dev/test workloads run fine on Standard.

5. Azure SQL Database: DTUs and vCores Aren’t as Cheap as They Look

DTU-based pricing can look cheap on paper, but unpredictable workloads cause performance throttling, pushing teams to over-provision.

Switched to vCore? Great — but did you forget about backup storage past 7 days and geo-redundant failover?

You pay for each active secondary replica. For high availability, it’s easy to double (or triple) costs without realizing it.

Use serverless for intermittent workloads — it auto-pauses and charges only for what you use.

6. Azure Functions and Logic Apps: Not “Free” at Scale

They scale beautifully. If you accidentally trigger a runaway function or Logic App loop, it can scale to infinity and bill you for every millisecond.

You’re charged per execution, memory used, and duration. That 500ms function was called 10 million times? That’s $$$.

Always set concurrency limits, timeouts, and alert thresholds. “Serverless” doesn’t mean “costless.”

7. Databricks: The Silent Budget Killer

Azure Databricks is powerful, but its pricing model is wild.

You’re charged per node, per DBU (Databricks Unit), per hour.
Notebooks left idle still rack up compute time unless you explicitly turn them off.
Autoscaling clusters often don’t scale down automatically if they hit a temporary peak.

Driver nodes can remain on while worker nodes scale down, meaning you’re still burning cash.

Use job clusters instead of interactive ones when possible. Set auto-termination after inactivity.

Azure Isn’t Out to Get You — But It’s Not Going to Save You Either

Azure is an incredibly powerful cloud platform — but it’s built to assume you know exactly what you’re doing. And let’s be real — most of us don’t have time to dig into 37 pricing calculators and hidden policy documents.

So here’s the takeaway: