Azure Functions Pricing
Understanding the cost of Azure Functions is crucial for managing your serverless applications effectively. Azure Functions offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, allowing you to scale resources dynamically and only pay for what you consume.
Key Pricing Components
The pricing for Azure Functions is primarily based on two factors:
- Execution Time (Consumption Plan): You are charged for the number of times your functions run and the total execution time in GB-seconds.
- Resource Consumption (Premium/Dedicated Plans): These plans offer predictable pricing with allocated resources and additional features like VNet connectivity.
Consumption Plan
The Consumption plan is the most common and cost-effective for event-driven applications and workloads with variable traffic. It includes a generous free grant each month.
- Free Grant: 1 million free requests and 400,000 GB-seconds of execution time per Azure subscription per month.
- Beyond Free Grant:
- Requests: $0.20 per 1 million requests
- Execution Time: $0.000016 per GB-second
Example: A function that runs 10 million times and consumes 128 MB of memory for 1 second each run would cost:
- Requests: (10,000,000 - 1,000,000 free) * $0.20 / 1,000,000 = $1.80
- Execution Time: (10,000,000 runs * 0.128 GB * 1 second) = 1,280,000 GB-seconds.
- (1,280,000 GB-seconds - 400,000 free GB-seconds) * $0.000016 / 1,000,000 GB-seconds = $0.0139 (approx.)
- Total estimated cost: $1.80 + $0.0139 = $1.8139
Premium Plan
The Premium plan offers enhanced capabilities for production workloads, including pre-warmed instances, VNet connectivity, and longer execution times. It's priced based on the number and size of the provisioned instances.
Pricing varies based on the instance size and count. For detailed current pricing, please refer to the official Azure Functions pricing page.
Dedicated (App Service) Plan
With the Dedicated plan, you run Azure Functions on the same infrastructure as Azure App Service. You pay for the underlying App Service plan, which provides dedicated compute resources.
This plan is suitable for predictable, high-scale workloads where you want to leverage existing App Service investments. Costs are based on the chosen App Service plan tier (e.g., Basic, Standard, Premium).
Other Considerations
- Networking: Outbound data transfer costs may apply based on your Azure region and network configuration.
- Storage: Azure Functions requires an Azure Storage account, which has its own associated costs.
- Application Insights: Monitoring and logging with Application Insights incur separate charges based on data ingestion and retention.
| Feature | Consumption Plan (Free Tier) | Consumption Plan (Paid) | Premium Plan | Dedicated Plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Requests | 1 Million / month | $0.20 / 1M requests | Included | Included |
| Execution Time (GB-seconds) | 400,000 / month | $0.000016 / GB-sec | Included | Included |
| Pre-warmed Instances | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| VNet Connectivity | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Max Execution Time | 5 mins (default) | 5 mins (default) | Unlimited (configurable) | Unlimited (configurable) |
| Cost Basis | Event-driven, pay-per-execution | Event-driven, pay-per-execution | Provisioned instances | App Service plan |
For the most up-to-date and detailed pricing information, including regional variations and specific plan tiers, please visit the Official Azure Functions Pricing Page.