I look at my Azure bill each month and cannot make heads or tails of it because each service I use in Azure is so broken down into such fine pieces that it makes no sense to me. I mean take a function, you pay for the memory it consumes, the CPU cycles it consumes, the bandwidth it consumes, and the total number of times it is executed each month. Come the fuck on! How much finer can you break a service down and charge separately for each component and then charge excessively for each component and then advertise it as a single item?

Seriously! I have spent the last month talking to Azure Sales, Microsoft Partner Solutions (I’m a partner I must admit), and Azure Billing trying to get an accurate quote for 4 C# functions executing 14,400,000 times a month consuming less than 128MB ram and using less than 512MB of bandwidth a month. After a month my answer is that no one CAN TELL ME! I was taken aback by that and told to try the pricing calculator after being told in a round-robin fashion to talk to so and so and then that person would refer me to another section and they would refer me back to another section that I had talked to two weeks earlier. It is just sad that they are billing this stuff and the people who are selling it and generating the billing statements don’t know how to generate a quote based on numbers calculated by their own pricing calculator LOL!

It all goes back to my post title, cloud companies have micro-segmented everything they sell down so far to their basic components and are charging outrageous prices for each and then advertising them as a whole package with no price tag on it. They just say, “Hey we got Serverless Functions! They’re easy to set up and use!” They don’t tell you that they are gonna bill you out the ass for each individual little piece that makes up the total function in that pitch or that they can’t honestly quote you an accurate price other than say get on a pricing plan and pray you don’t go over and end up paying Consumption Tier Pricing for going over your cap.

Apps are going the same way with micro-billing and features but I’m not going that way with mine. I’m going subscription in order to keep them updated and be able to keep my backends up to date and development environment current but I think I charge a reasonable price. That is what I am trying to do now with my upcoming app to bring the subscription cost down to a reasonable cost but Azure will literally eat 75% of the revenue generated from the individual subscription as it currently stands and I can’t bring the cost down enough to really make it more appealing to the end user. That is fucking sad.

Four C# functions should not cost $9500 a month for just an estimated 1000 users…… even when it takes them only 6 seconds to execute a task per user, per function…….ever…..

John