Azure costs increasing after subscription disabled

Question

Hi all!
I have checked similar threads, but couldn't find answers to my questions.
I created a subscription in Azure because I needed VMs for a training course I organized during 2 days (20&21 Oct). First I had the free subscription, with like 207€ bonus or something. I thought that this risks that the VMs stop in the middle of the training, so as I was seeing the popup offering to switch to "pay-as-you-go", I chose that subscription. From my past experience, I was expecting a bill of a few hundred dollars/euros, so I was taking a risk of a high bill, but at least I could stop the VMs and the subscription at any time.

Well...I stopped/deallocated the VMs (40 of them, about 26 have been in use) at 8pm CET last night. The bill was more than 1000€. I discovered that running VMs incur costs, so that is my mistake. But they were not accessed before Oct 20th, so only some allocation costs should have appeared in my account.
After like 2h, it went to about 1200€, then a couple of hours later to more than 1400€. Although all VMs were deallocated. What was increasing fast was first the bandwidth use, but also the VMs use, which is mind blowing.
At that moment I managed to read all possible forums and delete absolutely all resources (VMs, groups, disks etc). Under "All resources" I had nothing anymore. I even disabled my subscription (I cannot yet delete it)
Still, the costs were increasing. To 1600, right not to almost 1800. The forecast by end of month also increased from like 2000€ last night to almost 7000€ right now.
At 1600 I managed to find the phone numbers for support, opened a case and managed to raise the Severity to A.
It took already more than 3h, and had to call back twice, they are still investigating and don't know what happens.
My questions:

1. where did my initial 207€ disappear? when switching from free to pay-as-you-go, they are cancelled?
2. why I can't see anywhere that my subscription is "pay-as-you-go"? In Cost Management, I see a forecast for the whole month, although the subscription should be immediately cancelled. The guy on the hotline couldn't confirm either the type of subscription I have.
3. why were the costs increasing AFTER I deallocated the VMs? I saw that some resources are still in use, but the bandwidth cost and even the VMs costs kept increasing, although there was no activity anymore.
4. Why is the bandwidth cost increasing even now, when all resources are deleted and the subscription disabled? It increase steadily at the same crazy pace since last night.
5. Can it be that some used resources are calculated later and appear on the bill even after I disabled the subscription? Isn't the cost calculated on the fly? If the answer is yes, then I can expect that even in 1 month they keep calculating the use of some resources that were used until last night and add them to the bill?

I'm almost having a panic attack, I couldn't sleep and I can't relax, thinking that this bill keeps going up, no one can stop this, no one knows why, and it will ruin me for using Azure in 1 training course.
Thank you for your suggestions and answers in advance.

Answer 1

Update: finally an engineer called me (a couple of times), and after clarifying the issue, he wrote an email with the details of the costs (he says that my subscription is High performance or something like that) and stated that I will be billed 1785€ at the end of the month (that is the current amount), but that it won't be charged on the CC, instead I will receive an invoice and then I can contact him back to ask for refunds/modifications.
What surprises me is that the current amount is split by resources and per day, starting with account creation (13th Oct) until yesterday, 21st Oct. Meaning that in their system, 1785€ corresponds to what I have used until yesterday. When in fact last night the cost was around 1444€, and during the night/morning it increased twice to get to 1785€...
I'll keep updating and still hope for your thoughts and advices.

Answer 2

Hi @CristianD ,

you chosen the best way to open a support ticket with Microsoft. They are the best option to answer your questions because they should get access to all the metadata.

You should see the Order ID of your subscription this way (the table with different Order IDs are listed above):
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/costs/understand-cost-mgt-data#determine-your-offer-type

The forcast is a "what-if calculation" if you consume the same workload like the days before. For example your consumed 100 US$ from 1st day to 15th day of the month the forcast for the full month will be shown as about 200 USD$. If you stop all Azure services on 15th of the month for the rest of the month the forcast will decrease after a while.

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(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Regards
Andreas Baumgarten

Answer 3

Hi Andreas, thank you for your answer.

• I don't see the Offer Id in Overview, I see for example that status is Disabled and that Plan is "Azure Plan"
• "If you stop all Azure services on 15th of the month for the rest of the month the forcast will decrease after a while" - I think I understood how the forecast works, but in my case, after stopping all Azure services, the forecast was still increasing (heavily). Not only the same evening, but even after 12pm and this morning. So I saw the contrary of the expected behaviour.

Answer 4

Update: even after the written confirmation from the Microsoft employee that the invoice will be limited to 1785€, the Cost Management now shows a new value: 1898€
I can only hope that this and the further increases will not be added to the invoice, as promised...