Azure Cosmos DB pricing

You’re billed by the hour for the provisioned throughput, expressed in request units per second (RU/s), that you set for your database or container.

Standard provisioned throughput for an individual container:

If you create an Azure Cosmos DB database account in East US 2 with two containers with standard provisioned throughput of 500 RU/s and 700 RU/s, respectively, you would have a total provisioned throughput of 1,200 RU/s. You would thus be charged 12 x $- = $-/hour.

If your throughput needs changed, and you’ve increased each container’s capacity by 500 RU/s while also creating a new container using 20,000 RU/s, your overall provisioned capacity would be 22,200 RU/s (1,000 RU/s + 1,200 RU/s + 20,000RU/s). Your bill would then change to: $- x 222 = $-/hour.

In a month of 720 hours, if for 500 hours provisioned throughput was 1,200 RU/s and for the remaining 220 hours provisioned throughput was 22,200 RU/s, your monthly bill will show: 500 x $-/hour + 220 x $-/hour = $-/month.

Provisioned throughput for a database (a set of containers):

If you create an account in East US 2 with two Cosmos DB databases (with a set of collections under each) with provisioned throughput of 50K RU/s and 70K RU/s, respectively, you would have a total provisioned throughput of 120K RU/s. You would thus be charged 1200 x $- = $-/hour.

If your throughput needs changed and you increased each database’s provisioned throughput by 10K RU/s each, your overall provisioned capacity would be 140K RU/s (60K RU/s + 80K RU/s). Your bill would then change to: 1400 * $- = $-/hour.

In a month of 720 hours, if for 500 hours provisioned throughput was 120K RU/s and for the remaining 220 hours provisioned throughput was 140K RU/s, your monthly bill will show: 500 x $-/hour + 220 x $-/hour = $- + $- = $-/month.

In free tier accounts, you will receive the first 400 RU/s provisioned throughput and 5 GB of storage free each month. Any provisioned throughput and storage beyond 400 RU/s and 5 GB will be billed at the regular Azure Cosmos DB rates. The 400 RU/s applies to standard provisioned throughput, autoscale provisioned throughput, and multi-region writes (multi-master). Free tier is not applicable to serverless.

The free tier discount is applied at the account level. For example, if in one month, an account had a total of 400 RU/s and three regions, with 5 GB in each region, the account would be billed for 800 RU/s (400 RU/s x 3 regions – 400 RU/s) and 10 GB of storage (5 GB x 3 regions – 5 GB) for each hour in the month. If the regions have different rates for RU/s and storage, the discount will reflect the rates of the region the account was created in.

When you choose to make an Azure Cosmos DB account (with databases and containers) span across geographic regions, you are billed for the throughput and storage for each container in every region and the data transfer between regions. As an example, let’s assume you have a container in West US provisioned with throughput 10K RU/s and store 1TB of data this month. Let’s assume you add 3 regions: East US, North Europe, and East Asia, each with the same storage and throughput. Your total monthly bill will be (assuming 31 days in a month):

Let's also assume that you egress 100GB of data every month from the container in West US to replicate data into East US, North Europe and East Asia. You are billed for egress as per data transfer rates.

Storage capacity is billed in units of the maximum hourly amount of data stored, in GB, over a monthly period. For example, if you utilized 100 GB of storage for half of the month and 50 GB for the second half of the month, you would be billed for an equivalent of 75 GB of storage during that month.

You're billed for each hour the container or database exists, regardless of usage or if the container or database is active for less than an hour. For example, if you create a container or database and delete it 5 minutes later, your bill will reflect a 1 hour.

You are charged for the maximum provisioned throughput for any given hour.

For instance, if you increase provisioned throughput at 9:30 AM from 400 RU/s to 1,000 RU/s and then lower provisioned throughput at 10:45 AM back to 400 RU/s, you will be charged for two hours of 1,000 RU/s.

If you increase provisioned throughput for a container or a set of containers at 9:30 AM from 100K RU/s to 200K RU/s and then lower provisioned throughput at 10:45 AM back to 100K RU/s, you will be charged for two hours of 200K RU/s.

You can scale up or scale down the provisioned throughput (i.e., Request Units per second) for each container or a database by using the Azure Portal, one of the supported SDKs, ARM template, PowerShell, Azure CLI or the REST API.