Cognitive Search much cheaper than expected

Question

Hi,

My company have subscribed to a pay-as-you-go Cognitive Search/ AI Search.

We are using Standard (S1) tier and only 1 partition and 1 replica (1 scale unit). We are using Free Semantic search enabled. We have around 300000 documents (600MB).

On the pricing website, the cost for one (S1) scale unit is $245.28/month. However, last month (Feb 2024) we were only charged $112.90.

This is great for us, however this changes how we do forecasting.

Is there a hidden dependency?

For reference, I added a screenshot:

Answer 1

Hi,

Pricing giving in a website usually estimates are 720 hours (typical runtime for a month 24x7) there is also a popup that states "total usage hours is the number of hours per month that the group of users will be connected to the resources allocated to them &quot. so, is the final cost the combination of usage hours per user plus underlying hosting infrastructure and since maybe your usage would be less than 720 hours so you get less billed, it maybe something around 335 hours , please check below link and images for more details

Please check more on this for price calculations--> https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

Kindly accept answer , if it helps , Thanks!

Answer 2

@johananmahendran If I'm reading the chart correctly, it appears your service stopped accumulating charges on Feb 14th. $112.90*2= $225 and gets you awfully close to the expected total.

Was your service shut down on Feb 14th or something to cause the billing to stop? Otherwise, I agree with Deepanshu, the billing is done per hour basis. Not a fixed cost per month even if you only used it for part of the month.