Microsoft Azure Networking Plans Pricing
Azure Networking is product-priced (pay-as-you-go) per resource family — Virtual Network, Load Balancer, VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute, Front Door, DNS, Firewall, etc. The Azure Resource Manager (ARM) management/control-plane API used to manage these resources is itself free; charges are only incurred for the underlying resources deployed and for inter-region / outbound data transfer. Reserved Instances and savings plans provide discounts for committed use; Enterprise Agreement and Microsoft Customer Agreement customers receive negotiated terms.
Plans
Calling the Azure Resource Manager management API to create / read / update / delete network resources is free. You pay only for the underlying resources you provision.
- All ARM CRUD operations on Microsoft.Network resources
- Subject to ARM throttling limits (see rate-limits/)
Virtual Networks themselves are free. Charges apply for VNet peering, private endpoints, and outbound data transfer.
- Unlimited subnets per VNet
- Built-in IP address management
- Network security groups (free)
Standard Load Balancer is billed by rule count and processed data. Basic Load Balancer is free but lacks SLA.
- 99.99% SLA on Standard
- Cross-zone load balancing
Hourly billing per gateway SKU; egress data transfer billed separately.
- Site-to-site / point-to-site VPN
- Multiple SKU tiers (VpnGw1–VpnGw5, AZ variants)
Layer-7 load balancer / WAF. Billed per gateway-hour plus capacity units.
- SSL termination
- Web Application Firewall
- URL-based routing
Cloud-native firewall; billed per deployment-hour plus data processed.
- Threat intelligence
- TLS inspection (Premium)
- IDPS (Premium)
Public DNS hosted zones billed per zone per month + per million queries.
- Authoritative DNS
- Anycast routing
Global L7 load balancer / CDN. Standard / Premium tiers billed per outbound and per request, plus a base fee on Standard/Premium.
- Global anycast load balancing
- WAF (Premium)
- Bot protection (Premium)
Dedicated private connection to Azure. Metered or unlimited port pricing plus ExpressRoute Gateway and outbound data charges.
- Private peering to Microsoft backbone
- 99.95% SLA
Cross-region and internet egress is metered separately. First 100 GB per month egress to internet is free.
- Tiered volume discount
- Free inbound data
Negotiated pricing with committed-use discounts via EA, MCA-E, or CSP. Includes Reserved Instances, savings plans, and volume tier discounts.
- 1-year / 3-year reserved capacity discounts
- Azure consumption commitment (MACC)
- Dedicated technical account management
- Custom data residency
Sources
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-network/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/load-balancer/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/vpn-gateway/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/azure-firewall/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/dns/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/frontdoor/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/expressroute/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/