Azure Cognitive Search pricing
Search-as-a-service for web and mobile app development
- No upfront cost
- No termination fees
- Pay only for what you use
- Per-hour billing
AI-powered cloud search service for web and mobile app development
- Enrich and extract insights through cognitive skills
- Get your search indices up and running quickly
- Easily scale up and down
- Connect search results to business goals with greater control over search rankings
- Take advantage of Microsoft’s deep knowledge of natural language processing
- Easily add geospatial search to your app
US government entities are eligible to purchase Azure Government services from a licensing solution provider with no upfront financial commitment or directly through a pay-as-you-go online subscription.
Important: The price in R$ is merely a reference; this is an international transaction and the final price is subject to exchange rates and the inclusion of IOF taxes. An eNF will not be issued.
Azure Germany is available to customers and partners who have already purchased this, doing business in the European Union (EU), the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and in the United Kingdom (UK). It provides data residency in Germany with additional levels of control and data protection. You can also sign up for a free Azure trial.
US government entities are eligible to purchase Azure Government services from a licensing solution provider with no upfront financial commitment or directly through a pay-as-you-go online subscription.
Important: The price in R$ is merely a reference; this is an international transaction and the final price is subject to exchange rates and the inclusion of IOF taxes. An eNF will not be issued.
Azure Germany is available to customers and partners who have already purchased this, doing business in the European Union (EU), the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) and in the United Kingdom (UK). It provides data residency in Germany with additional levels of control and data protection. You can also sign up for a free Azure trial.
Pricing details
Offered in combinable units that include reliable storage and throughput, Azure Cognitive Search allows developers to set up and scale a search experience quickly and cost effectively. As the volume of data or throughput needs of an application change, Azure Cognitive Search can scale out to meet these needs, and then scale back down to reduce costs. To get more performance, a customer can combine units to gain more queries per second, or a higher document count, or both. Units can also be combined to enable high availability or faster data ingestion.
High density (HD) mode is an optional setting available for standard S3. High density mode enables customers to pack in a higher number of indices per Azure Cognitive Search service. This is ideal for customers building multi-tenant SaaS apps that have a large number of small tenants, trials or free accounts, and want to provide a powerful search experience at a low cost per index.
Storage Optimized editions, L1 & L2, offer significantly more storage at a reduced price per tier. These editions are ideal for solutions with a large volume of index data and low query demands throughout the day. This is well suited for internal applications searching over large file repositories, searching an archive of many years of business data, or e-discovery.
You can enrich a limited number of documents for free, or attach a billable Cognitive Services resource for larger and more frequent workloads. Built-in cognitive skill execution is charged at the Cognitive Services pay-as-you go price, at the same rate as if you had performed the task directly. Learn more about skill execution.
| Free | Basic | Standard S1 | Standard S2 | Standard S3 | Storage Optimised L1 | Storage Optimised L2 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Storage | 50 MB | 2 GB |
25 GB
(max. 300 GB per service) |
100 GB
(max. 1 TB per service) |
200 GB
(max. 2 TB per service) |
1 TB
(max. 12 TB per service) |
2 TB
(max. 24 TB per service) |
| Max. indexes per service | 3 | 15 | 50 | 200 | 200 or 1000/partition in high density1 mode | 10 | 10 |
| Scale out limits | N/A |
Up to 3 units per service (max. 1 partition; max. 3 replicas) |
Up to 36 units per service (max. 12 partition; max. 12 replicas) |
Up to 36 units per service (max. 12 partition; max. 12 replicas) |
Up to 36 units per service (max. 12 partition; max. 12 replicas) up to 12 replicas in high density1 mode |
Up to 36 units per service (max. 12 partition; max. 12 replicas) |
Up to 36 units per service (max. 12 partition; max. 12 replicas) up to 12 replicas in high density1 mode |
| Document cracking: Image extraction |
N/A (only 20 documents supported) |
(price per 1,000 images) 0-1M images - $- 1M-5M images - $- 5M+ images - $- |
(price per 1,000 images) 0-1M images - $- 1M-5M images - $- 5M+ images - $- |
(price per 1,000 images) 0-1M images - $- 1M-5M images - $- 5M+ images - $- |
(price per 1,000 images) 0-1M images - $- 1M-5M images - $- 5M+ images - $- |
(price per 1,000 images) 0-1M images - $- 1M-5M images - $- 5M+ images - $- |
(price per 1,000 images) 0-1M images - $- 1M-5M images - $- 5M+ images - $- |
| Private Endpoints Related Charges | N/A | Additional charges may apply2 | Additional charges may apply2 | Additional charges may apply2 | Additional charges may apply2 | Additional charges may apply2 | Additional charges may apply2 |
| Price per unit | Free N/A | $- | $- | $- | $- | $- | $- |
Learn more about service limits and constraints.
Cognitive Search: AI-powered content augmentation
With the new cognitive search feature, you can use artificial intelligence to extract insights and structured information from your documents. Create pipelines that use cognitive skills to enrich and bring structure to your data before it gets indexed. You can select from a variety of pre-built cognitive skills and also extend its power by creating your own custom skills. You can enrich a limited number of documents for free, or attach a billable Cognitive Services resource for larger and more frequent workloads. Built-in cognitive skill execution is charged at the Cognitive Services pay-as-you go price, at the same rate as if you had performed the task directly. Learn more about skill execution.
Support and SLA
- We provide technical support for all Azure services released to general availability through Azure Support, starting at $29/month. Billing and subscription management support is provided at no cost.
- We guarantee at least 99.9% availability for index query requests when an Azure Cognitive Search service instance is configured with two or more replicas, and index update requests when an Azure Cognitive Search service instance is configured with three or more replicas. No SLA is provided for the free tier. Read the SLA.
FAQ
-
With Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search, you are billed on a flat, predictable hourly rate based on the number of units that have been used during any given hour.
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You are billed the maximum number of search units provisioned during any hour. If you start with two units, then scale up to four units, and then scale back down to two units all within an hour, you will be charged for four units.
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The stop button is meant to stop traffic to your service instance. As a result, your service will still be running and will continue to be charged the hourly rate.
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You are billed the flat rate for each hour the unit exists, regardless of usage or whether the unit is active for less than an hour. For example, if you create a unit and delete it five minutes later, your bill will reflect a charge for one unit hour.
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Azure Cognitive Search units combine to provide additional throughput and storage. For example, to scale from 15 million documents to 30 million (additional partitions), a customer can purchase two units. To increase throughput (additional replicas), they can purchase two units. To increase both storage and throughput, a customer would need to purchase four units (2 replicas x 2 partitions = 4 search units).
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Free is a free version of Azure Cognitive Search designed to provide developers a sandbox to test features and implementations of Azure Cognitive Search. It is not designed for production workloads. Basic, standard and storage optimised are the go-to options for building applications that benefit from a self-managed search-as-a-service solution. Standard delivers storage and predictable throughput that scales with application needs. Storage Optimised editions offer significantly more storage at a reduced price per TB. For very high-demand applications, please contact azuresearch_contact@microsoft.com.
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Azure Cognitive Search is available in the new Microsoft Azure portal. First, you must sign up for an Azure subscription, then you can add an Azure Cognitive Search account to your Azure subscription via the gallery in the preview portal. Get more information.
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Cognitive Search is in public preview, and skillset execution is currently offered for free. At a later time, the pricing for this capability will be announced.
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