Elaine Cahill takes us through an Azure monthly bill:
I received an Azure bill for the period Feb. 6th 2026 – March 5th 2026 that was $2.38 usage charges, with no tax added. Although a small amount, I decided it would be a good introductory example for anyone that has to understand and pay for Azure. My account is Pay-As-You-Go and I use it for learning, experiments and proof of concepts.
Click through for that primer. I think, on the whole, the way Azure shows billing is okay. The tricky part is when you want to reduce the bill. They’ll show you, for example, that you have D3 v2 or DS3 v2 virtual machines running in East US 2, but then you have to dig in and figure out which of your virtual machines are running that SKU. And there are some services that spin up VMs in the background, so you might see billing for that even if you didn’t directly create a VM of that SKU.
But with a bit of digging, you can at least gain an understanding of what’s costing money in Azure.