Azure Search pricing

With Microsoft Azure Search, you are billed on a flat, predictable hourly rate based on the number of units that have been used during any given hour.

You are billed the maximum number of search units provisioned during any hour. If you start with two units and scale to four units and scale back down to two units all within an hour, you will be charged for four units.

The stop button is meant to stop traffic to your service instance. As a result, your service is still running and will continue to be charged the hourly rate.

You are billed the flat rate for each hour the unit exists, regardless of usage or if the unit is active for less than an hour. For example, if you create a unit and delete it 5 minutes later, your bill will reflect a charge for 1 unit hour.

Azure Search Units combine to provide additional throughput and storage. For example, to scale from 15MM documents to 30MM (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).

Free is a free version of Azure Search designed to provide developers a sandbox to test features and implementations of Search. It is not designed for production workloads. Basic and Standard are the go-to options for building applications which benefit from a self-managed search-as-a-service solution. Standard delivers storage and predictable throughput that scales with application needs. For very high-demand applications, please contact azuresearch_contact@microsoft.com.

Microsoft Azure Search is available in the new Microsoft Azure portal. First you must sign up for a Microsoft Azure subscription. Once you sign up for a Microsoft Azure subscription, you can add a Search account to your Azure subscription via the Gallery in the Preview Portal. For more information see the Azure Search documentation pages.