Diagram
A four-column comparison matrix contrasting Pay-As-You-Go, Reserved Instances, Azure Savings Plans, and Spot Pricing across commitment, discount, flexibility, and ideal workload categories.
Explore Azure Pricing Models
Choosing the right pricing model is a key decision point that depends on your workload's predictability and flexibility. The default option is Pay-As-You-Go, which charges only for the exact resources you consume on a per-second or per-minute basis. This model offers the greatest flexibility, making it ideal for short-term testing or highly variable workloads where you must start and stop services on demand.
For predictable, steady-state workloads, you can trade flexibility for lower rates by choosing commitment-based pricing. Reserved Instances allow you to prepay for services like virtual machines for one- or three-year terms to receive deep discounts. Alternatively, Azure Savings Plans offer similar discounts but apply more flexibly to a broad mix of compute services across your entire environment.
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