Steve Jones walks through a painful experience:
I hadn’t done much in the last couple of months on Azure. For some reason, I decided to check my bill. What I found was that there were charges for $35-ish/month. This is within my free credit limit as an MVP, but that seemed high. I have a few serverless dbs and some storage, but I was expecting more of a $15 charge.
Azure billing is probably 85% of what an ideal billing solution would look like. There’s a lot of detail and you can get the bill down to a pretty granular level. But the problem is, like Steve found out here, that it’s really hard to tie back individual line items to specific services in a consistent way. Sometimes it’s because of ancillary costs like networking bandwidth. Sometimes, it’s a problem where you can’t easily see what specific resource is costing you money. Either way, it turns a proper audit of the bill into a bit of an ordeal.