Foundry Doc intelligence cost

Question

Azure AI Foundry is incurring a relatively high cost of approximately USD 80 per day and ~2000$ only for foundry. Based on our analysis in Cost Management, Azure Document Intelligence appears to be the primary contributor to this cost. This is unexpected, as the total number of documents is fewer than 15, with each document being approximately 115 KB in size and only 2–3 pages long. Could you help us understand why the Foundry/Document Intelligence cost is so high for such a small document set?

Answer 1

Hi,

The cost is most likely not related to the file size of the documents, but to how many pages were analyzed, which Document Intelligence feature/model was used, and how many times the documents were processed.

Azure Document Intelligence billing is based on the model type and the number of pages analyzed. Also, when a document is submitted for analysis, the service processes all pages unless a page range is explicitly specified.

So even if you only have fewer than 15 documents and each one is only 2–3 pages, the cost can still increase if the same files were analyzed repeatedly during testing, Studio usage, pipeline retries, or multiple model runs.

A few things to check:

In the Document Intelligence resource, go to Monitoring / Metrics and review Processed Pages

Split the metric by FeatureName to see which model or feature is generating the usage

In Azure Cost Analysis, group by Resource and Meter to confirm whether the charge is coming only from Document Intelligence or whether other Foundry-related resources/meters are also contributing

If custom models are involved, verify whether layout-based label generation was used, because that can also be billed

One important point: training a custom model itself is free, but document analysis and certain supporting operations such as layout usage for label generation can still incur charges.

Based on the document volume you described, a cost of about USD 80/day would usually suggest repeated processing or additional billable usage, i would say :) ..

Maybe this links would help for clarification :

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/document-intelligence/how-to-guides/estimate-cost?view=doc-intel-4.0.0

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-services/document-intelligence/service-limits?view=doc-intel-4.0.0

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/foundry/concepts/manage-costs

Hope this helps.