Spending Limit or Maximum Cost CAP for Azure
As a customer, I really care about Spending Limit or Spending CAP feature of Azure.
How does Azure prevent some evil attack to my Azure sites causing charge a large billing of Credit Card?
For example, it should automatically shut off or temporary disable my site when a certain dollar amount has been reached.
Is this feature in the RoadMap of Azure?
Or is there anyway to control my maximum Spending Limit of Azure?
Thanks.

Quick update,
We have been considering all of the risks and investigating the steps required to ensure we implement this feature with high positive impact and low to no negative impact.
After this investigation we have decided we will enable Pay-As-You-Go customers the option to configure a spending limit on a Pay-As-You-Go subscription, with appropriate safeguards and measures to prevent both service abuse and production service failure.
We have not yet finished determining the details of what this feature will look like, nor do we have a timeline for release, but we have heard your voices and have added this feature to our backlog.
Thanks for your continued feedback,
-Adam (Azure Billing Team)
197 comments
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Ryan commented
I'd like to have an account that's more suitable to development and testing where I can test and confirm some of my cost assumptions / calculations. Some Azure cost calculations can be difficult to do if you're not familiar with a product/service and trying to learn enough to make accurate calculations isn't the type of thing I want to do on an account that doesn't have some type of failsafe to prevent runaway costs.
I'd be willing to pay an activation fee, buy use-them-or-lose-them credits, forgo trial credits, pay a revoke-able (if abusing the service) bond (up to $250), have a separate non-production account, have no SLA, etc.. I just want a way to have an upper bound on runaway costs to keep them inline with what's tolerable for me personally.
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Havlíček Jan commented
Since I haven't seen it mentioned, there is an option to buy a $100 credit in the form of Online Service Activation (OSA) Key from a reseller (valid fro 12 months). That should just stop everything, if credits run out.
> What happens if an Azure in Open subscription reaches a zero balance?
> If an Azure in Open subscription reaches a zero balance the services will be suspended. The data will be retained for 90 days and once funds are added to the subscription the services can be reinstated, however there could be some services that would need to be redeployed. -
Greg commented
What *proactive* ways are there to limit the blast radius of costs in Azure? The idea of spending "infinite money" makes Azure too risky to start projects.
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Anonymous commented
I am planning to use Azure for my small business. Without spending limit I don't think this will work for me as any user can just sky rocket the cost.
I am surprised on how long this is taking to get implemented even though votes are past 3K.
What happened to customer obsession ?
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Marcus commented
I dont have much traffic at all on my site, but what if someone is attacking my site etc, crawlers, spiders... Things from outside that I dont have control over that are consuming my site.
In theory this could actually make me bankrupt from one day to another, even if I normally only have some dollars in monthly cost! Thats not okey at all.
I have set up an "budget alert" sending me email, but I sleep during nights and what if dont see that email immedately? The consumption must be stopped when it reaches the maximum cost what I can pay.
This is a basic and vital function that you Microsoft must implement, I cant risk my entire economy and life just for having a small website hosted in Azure!
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Roger commented
I too stopped my free trial application when It got to the credit card point and I realised the unlimited liability implications of the full product. I suspect a lot of the small and medium sized stop there. Maybe that’s the intention.
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Nattaphong Junsuwan commented
MICROSOFThas a new one in the future
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Anonymous commented
Can we disable the account created in azure when it reached the budget limit in azure
Please help me with any workaround is there
Or any feature which triggers this action in azure -
Long commented
I guess that they didn't want to add this feature because that would be the way they earned money from some kind of stupid reasons, looking forward to another 5 years then
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Anonymous commented
5 years and still waiting...
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G. Jongeneel commented
More than 3000 votes, a couple of years later and not a single update or sign of any progress. It's a bit disappointing to say the least. This would be a vital element of Cost Management.
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Anonymous commented
Is there any update on this? Maybe another "quick update" after 5 years of silence?
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Mathias Halkjær commented
"..we have heard your voices..." but decide to ignore the feature for 5 straight years. Incredible.
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RvS commented
i have been looking everywhere, feeling stupid that I could not set a cap...
Wow! It is not possible? Incredible... -
Anonymous commented
Just chiming in as another who really would like this feature. With nearly 3k votes, it's pretty ridiculous that the Azure team can't even provide an update (let alone take action) on this in nearly 5 years time.
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Frank commented
Dear all,
Is there any progress on this? For my own teams use (development, demo), we use an PayGo subscription with an creditcard.
We have a CAP of 12k per year as spending budget - how can I force the subscription to be suspended when this amount is reached? Without making an alert + trigger + function app?
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Rohit Tidke commented
Hallo Microsoft,
I am losing my patiance on this. I cannot work with something especially a team using my subsciption without limits. Please enable this feature or else I will be forced to switch to Amazon or Google Cloud
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Mike commented
Azure Cost Management and related Budgets and cost projections are a great tool in Azure.
Along with existing Cost Management features, a great way of implementing cost management would be through spending limits, which on the most high dollar Azure Offer (EA), is not available. The Azure Enterprise Dev/Test Offer should include spending limits because a non-production environment is exactly where you might expect to have very costly surprises. It would be great if Microsoft took an already implemented cost management solution, spending limits, and allow customers to control unplanned expenditures in non-production subscriptions.
Reference Links:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0148p/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-details/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/spending-limitPlease take the already existing feature of other Azure offers and make that feature, spending limits, available for the Enterprise Agreement and Enterprise Dev/Test Offer.
Thanks!
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Chris commented
Almost 5 years since the last "quick update", but a spending limit on PAYG is still not available. :(
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Mike commented
Spending limits are clearly possible:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-details/
On an EA agreement or EA Dev/Test offer agreement, when Microsoft enables this feature, it will save customers money, which is one selling point for moving to Azure. Let's save some more money by allowing sending caps. Biggest concern is around developers spinning up something for testing without realizing that very little deployment effort is required to spend thousands per day as an unintended consequence of a single POC deployment.