Frequently Asked Questions

Prices are fetched nightly from the official Azure Retail Prices API (prices.azure.com) for UK South in GBP. They reflect retail/pay-as-you-go rates. Enterprise Agreement, CSP, and reserved instance discounts are not applied — your actual contracted price will likely be lower. Always verify final pricing via the official Azure pricing calculator before committing to a purchase decision.

Several factors can cause a difference: Enterprise Agreement or CSP discounts, free tier credits, reserved instance savings, Azure Hybrid Benefit, Dev/Test pricing, and the fact that Azure bills some services at a granularity that differs from the estimate inputs. Estimates are a starting point for planning and comparison — not a billing guarantee.

When you restore archived Log Analytics data, Azure bills a minimum of 2TB (2,048 GB) regardless of actual data size. Restoring 3GB costs exactly the same as restoring 2,048GB — £189.24/day at current UK South rates. The minimum only stops mattering once your actual data exceeds 2TB. See our full explanation and cost comparison →

Search Jobs query archived data asynchronously and write results to a _SRCH table — charged at £0.0046/GB scanned with no minimum. Restore brings archived data into a hot cache for repeated KQL querying — charged at £0.0924/GB/day with a 2TB minimum. For ad-hoc investigations use Search Jobs. Only use Restore when you need to run 50+ queries against the same dataset over multiple days. Full comparison guide →

This is standard cloud industry practice. Inbound data helps providers sell services (you are storing more with them), so it is free. Outbound data consumes network bandwidth that Microsoft must pay for and manage. The first 100GB/month of outbound internet egress from Azure is free — charges apply above that threshold.

LRS stores 3 copies within a single datacentre — cheapest, but a datacentre failure could cause data loss. ZRS stores 3 copies across 3 availability zones — protects against datacentre failure, ~25% more than LRS. GRS stores 6 copies across 2 regions (UK South + UK West) — protects against regional failure, ~2× LRS cost. RA-GRS is GRS with a readable secondary region. For production workloads ZRS is the minimum recommended option.

Archive is designed for data you rarely or never access — compliance archives, legal holds, and long-term backups you are required to keep but will almost certainly never read. Data in Archive is offline and must be rehydrated (which takes hours) before it can be read. A 180-day minimum retention period applies — early deletion is penalised. Never place data in Archive if you might need it quickly or access it more than once or twice a year.

Commitment tiers are reserved daily ingestion capacity (100–500 GB/day) that offer up to 25% savings compared to PAYG rates. The 100 GB/day commitment tier breaks even at approximately 90 GB/day of billable ingestion. If your workspace consistently ingests above 90 GB/day, the 100 GB commitment tier will save money. Use our Log Analytics calculator to find the break-even point for your ingestion volume.

Yes. Sentinel adds a per-GB charge on top of Log Analytics ingestion. The combined PAYG rate is approximately £6.10/GB. However, free data allowances offset this for many deployments: Microsoft 365 E5 licences include 5 MB/user/day free, and Defender for Servers P2 includes 500 MB/server/day free. The 31-day free trial for new Sentinel workspaces also helps evaluate cost before committing.

Use the ❓ feedback button on any calculator results panel to report a pricing issue. If the estimate looks wrong, first use the Save & Share Estimate button to save the estimate — this captures the exact inputs and result so our team can reproduce the issue. We review all reports within 48 hours. Prices are refreshed nightly from the Azure Retail Prices API so most discrepancies resolve automatically overnight.

No. AzureCalc.uk is an independent tool built for UK Azure practitioners. Prices are sourced from Microsoft's public Azure Retail Prices API. AzureCalc.uk is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or sponsored by Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft Azure and related product names are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation.

Yes — use the Save & Share Estimate button on any calculator results panel. This saves your estimate to a unique URL (e.g. azure-calc.co.uk/estimate/abc123) that you can share with colleagues. Estimates are stored for 90 days. Your saved estimates are also listed at azure-calc.co.uk/saved — these are stored in your browser and are device-specific.

Currently UK South only — the primary Azure region for most UK organisations. All prices are fetched with armRegionName eq 'uksouth' and currencyCode eq 'GBP' from the Azure Retail Prices API. Multi-region support is planned for a future update.