Azure VM Cost Calculator

Pricing a D2s_v3, and the licence question underneath it

A D2s_v3 running continuously costs about $70.08 a month — 730 hours at roughly $0.096 an hour — which is ₹6,027 at ₹86 to the dollar, or $840.96 a year.

Azure's compute pricing looks much like its competitors', but the thing that most often decides whether Azure is cheap or expensive for an organisation is not the instance rate at all. It is licensing — specifically whether you already own Windows Server and SQL Server licences with Software Assurance.

How the estimate is built

Monthly cost = hourly rate × hours per month

730 hours represents a full month of continuous running (8,760 ÷ 12). Azure bills per minute, so partial usage is genuinely prorated and shutting down a development VM overnight and at weekends cuts its cost by roughly two-thirds.

The B-series and how burstable credits work

The default options here include B-series machines, which price very differently from the rest and are widely misunderstood.

A burstable VM is allocated a baseline CPU performance — a B2s, for example, is entitled to a fraction of a full core continuously. When it runs below that baseline it accrues credits; when it needs more, it spends them to burst up to full core performance. Credits accumulate up to a cap and are lost beyond it.

This makes B-series excellent value for workloads that are idle most of the time and occasionally busy: small web servers, build agents, internal tools, low-traffic APIs. It makes them a poor and frustrating choice for anything with sustained CPU load, because once credits are exhausted the VM is throttled hard to its baseline, and the symptom — a machine that was fine for days and then became inexplicably slow — is difficult to diagnose if you do not know the mechanism.

Where the savings are

Azure Hybrid Benefit — the big one. If you own Windows Server or SQL Server licences with active Software Assurance, you may apply them to Azure VMs and pay only the Linux compute rate. Microsoft cites savings up to 85% when combined with reservations for SQL workloads. For an enterprise already licensed on-premises, this frequently dominates every other pricing consideration.

Reserved VM Instances — one or three-year commitments to a VM size in a region, saving up to 72% against pay-as-you-go. Reservations are exchangeable and cancellable with limits, which makes them less rigid than they first appear.

Savings Plans for compute — commit to an hourly spend rather than a specific size, trading a little discount for flexibility across series and regions.

Spot VMs — surplus capacity at steep discounts, evictable with 30 seconds' notice.

Dev/Test pricing — for Visual Studio subscribers, substantially reduced rates on non-production workloads, including no Windows licence charge.

Reading your estimate

The rate is an approximation for a common region. Azure prices vary by region, and the Central India and South India regions differ from US pricing. The figure also assumes Linux; a Windows VM adds a licence component unless Hybrid Benefit applies.

Excluded from the estimate: managed disks, which bill separately by tier and provisioned size and continue charging while the VM is deallocated; bandwidth, where outbound transfer beyond the free allowance is charged; public IP addresses; and GST at 18% for Indian customers.

Common mistakes

Choosing B-series for steady load. Credit exhaustion produces severe, confusing throttling.

Assuming a stopped VM is free. It must be deallocated, not merely shut down from inside the guest OS, and even deallocated VMs continue to incur disk charges.

Overlooking Hybrid Benefit. Organisations routinely pay full Windows rates on licences they already own.

Reserving before right-sizing. Azure Advisor's utilisation data should precede any three-year commitment.