Using Azure

Question

I am new to Azure and am trying to understand why my account currently shows a balance of approximately $94.

As far as I understand, my application has not been launched publicly and is still in development. Most of my work has been done locally, and the application has not been actively running for production use. Because of this, I am confused about how these charges were generated.

I would appreciate it if someone could review my subscription and explain exactly which resources or services caused these charges. If possible, I would also like you to consider waiving or crediting these charges, since I am a first-time Azure user and did not realize I was incurring billable usage.

At the moment, the outstanding balance is preventing me from continuing with my project or moving forward with deployment. I would be grateful for any assistance you can provide, including resetting the balance, applying available credits, or advising me on the best way to proceed.

Thank you for your time and help. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

K

Answer 1

Hello Kai'Wen,

Greetings! Thanks for raising this question in the Q&A forum.

The balance you're seeing is almost always caused by resources that were created during development and are still running or provisioned in your subscription, even if your application itself isn't publicly launched. Azure bills for provisioned capacity and consumption (compute uptime, storage, static IPs, databases, etc.) regardless of whether the app is receiving live production traffic. Free trial credit or promotional credit also expires after a fixed period, after which any usage is billed at pay as you go rates even on a low activity subscription. The steps below will help you find exactly what generated the $94 and how to request a review or credit.

Identify which resources generated the charge In the Azure portal, go to Cost Management + Billing, then select your subscription, then open Cost analysis. Switch the view to Cost by resource (or Cost by service) and set the date range to the current billing period. This breaks the $94 down by individual resource so you can see exactly what is driving the cost.

Check for resources left running from local development Common culprits for a "still in development" app are:

• A Virtual Machine or App Service plan left in a running (not stopped/deallocated) state
• A SQL/Cosmos DB/PostgreSQL instance provisioned above the free tier
• A Static IP address or VPN Gateway reserved but unused
• Storage accounts or Container Registry with data retained Stopping a VM in the portal is not enough to avoid charges, it must be Stopped (deallocated), otherwise compute is still billed.

Review the invoice for a day by day breakdown Go to Billing, then Invoices, and download the latest invoice or usage detail CSV. This gives you exact dates, resource names, and amounts, which is useful both for your own review and for any support request.

Check whether your free credit has expired If this subscription started as a free trial, go to Subscriptions in the portal and check the Offer type and expiration date. Once free credit is exhausted or expired, any resources left running convert automatically to pay as you go billing, which is a very common source of unexpected charges for new users.

Delete or stop unused resources Once you have identified the resources from step 1, delete anything you no longer need through Resource groups in the portal. This stops further charges from accruing. If you want to keep the resource group but avoid a repeat charge, ensure VMs are stopped (deallocated) rather than just shut down inside the OS.

Request a billing review or credit through a support ticket Microsoft support agents cannot review or waive charges through this Q&A forum, this requires a formal billing support request. To create one:

• Go to Help + support in the Azure portal, or directly to Create a support request
• Choose Issue type: Billing
• Choose Problem type: Understand my bill or Refund request
• In the description, reference the specific resources and dates you identified in step 1, and mention that you are a first time Azure user Billing support is included at no extra cost with every Azure subscription regardless of your support plan tier, so you do not need a paid support plan to open this ticket. Refund/credit approval is at Microsoft's discretion and is handled by that support team, not by community moderators.

If this answer helps you kindly accept the answer which will help others who have similar questions.

Best Regards,

Jerald Felix.