Billing Features of Azure Cloud Services

The Azure Service Billing Instructions provide detailed guidance on billing for customers who are using or about to start using Azure services. As different customers’ usage scenarios are never exactly the same, your final bills will be based on the amount for the services you actually deploy. These billing instructions are only intended to provide a reference and recommendations. The Azure service resource fees published on the website shall prevail.

Azure is a constantly-growing collection of integrated cloud services that provides customers in China with dozens of cloud services, helping customers to reduce operating costs and work more efficiently. You can choose the services you need to use and deploy from a range of flexible options based on the actual needs of your project. Every service is billed individually, with separate prices for different configurations, tiers, and series, providing transparent pricing to meet a diverse range of business needs. Azure will not charge you any additional fees for services that have not been enabled. We also provide totally free services such as Azure Active Directory. If you become a paying Azure customer, you can enjoy Service Level Agreements with up to 99.999% availability. Azure helps you to quickly deploy infrastructure and services to meet your business needs, helping you to reduce operating costs, and enabling you to focus on your core business.

Azure Cloud Services have the following billing features:

• Billing based on actual usage All Azure services are billed on the basis of your actual configuration or usage, but there are significant differences in compute units for different services. For example, commonly used compute services are billed by the minute, calculated from the time that you start until the time you finish. However, data storage and transfer are billed by the gigabyte (GB). Our compute calculations are based on the infrastructure and services that you purchase. You can shut down your cloud resources at any time, enabling you to avoid any unnecessary expenditure at times when you don’t need to use them, thereby reducing costs.

• Tiered billing We use tiered billing for some Azure services. This provides you with lower usage costs if your resource needs increase. For example, the more data storage resources your use, the lower the cost per GB will be.

• Billing for services in preview mode Azure launches new services every month. You can experience some new services with discounts of up to 50% during the preview stage. This helps you enjoy these new experiences at a lower cost.

• Price protection (for enterprise customers who have signed an Online Service Premier Agreement (OSPA)) As Azure continues to develop, we are constantly looking for ways to control operating costs and improve our business model.

  a) We guarantee that for enterprise customers who have signed an Advanced Online Service Agreement, whenever any price drops occur, they will always be charged at the new price and will receive the best prices in a timely manner.
  b) If you have signed up for standard online services, please regularly check the official website for the latest price details in accordance with your needs.

• Azure custom services We can provide Azure service packages tailored to unique requirements or large-scale projects. Please contact our sales representatives for more information.

As Azure is a global service, our usage reports calculate usage using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). In the following section, we will provide an introduction to billing for the basic Azure services: compute, storage, and data transfer. These services are widely used by Azure customers and affect the main usage costs. We will provide a breakdown of the billing logic for these services, and we hope that you will be able to use these explanations to better plan your applications and project budgets.