How are hours of compute counted for DevBox? Are they rounded up to the nearest whole number per day or per month?

Question

The DevBox pricing table gives costs for hourly compute but it isn't clear how hours are counted.

Answer 1

@Paawan Sharma

As per your question, the DevBox pricing table on the Azure website lists costs for hourly compute, but it is not clear how hours are counted.

According to the Azure documentation, for Compute, Microsoft will bill for each minute the VM ran for a given hour (up to six decimals of accuracy). If your virtual machine ran for 6 minutes and 45 seconds, how much do you get billed? Microsoft charges for the number of full minutes your virtual machine is running, so you are not billed for any extra seconds. In this example, you would be billed for 6 minutes.

Microsoft DevLabs has two plans

1. Dev Box enables you to pay a predictable monthly price per Dev Box instance for unlimited usage of that instance during a billing month. I believe the agent might be talking about this plan.
2. For flexible usage, pay as you go up to the max monthly price based on the configuration of the Dev Box instance. When a Dev Box is created, you pay a monthly storage fee until the Dev Box is deleted and pay a compute rate for each hour of active usage during the month. When a Dev Box's total cost (including its monthly storage and hourly compute) reaches the level of the max monthly price of that instance for that month, billing will automatically stop for that Dev Box instance.

Once the data usage is collected, the invoice is generated once per month. Please feel free to ask us if you have any questions.

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References:

• https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/vm-usage
• https://statics.teams.cdn.office.net/evergreen-assets/safelinks/1/atp-safelinks.html
• Compute cost estimates - Hosting models
• How am I billed? - What factors influence the cost of a service on Azure?