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.

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Mike shared this idea · October 07, 2012 · Flag idea as inappropriate… · Admin →

planned ·

AdminAzure Billing Team (Admin, Microsoft Azure) responded · September 09, 2015

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)

Show previous admin responses (4)

under review ·

AdminAzure Billing Team (Admin, Microsoft Azure) responded · June 23, 2015

Hi there,

My sincere apologies for how long this post has gone unanswered. The Azure billing team has undergone a transformation to ship features faster and improve our responsiveness to our customers. The new team is excited to re-engage with the community and deliver the features you need for a consistent and reliable cloud billing experience.

We are considering the addition of this feature. We do know that many customers are more concerned with availability than cost caps. That being said, we are exploring options through which a configurable cap feature might be integrated. Unfortunately we do not currently have a planned time-frame for this feature.

The good news is that we are integrating billing alerts and notifications into our platform. In using billing alerts, you will receive emails upon reaching certain usage thresholds in a given month.

To access this preview feature, navigate to the Azure accounts portal (account.windowsazure.com) and when viewing your subscriptions there should be a tab entitled “preview features” and you can sign up for billing alerts at the bottom of that page.

We understand that many customers have security concerns, and don’t want to be billed for the activity of fraudsters. We at Microsoft take security very seriously, and work tirelessly to prevent attacks like that. In the event of a breach, we will work with you to solve the issue and ensure appropriate billing occurs.

If there are any other concerns, please continue to express them here. The Azure billing team and I will do our best to let these voices be heard in the rest of our organization.

Update:

Thanks for the continued interest and feedback. I recognize that Billing Alerts don’t address every concern on this post, but we are considering various solutions to address these issues. I will continue to post updates here.

@Chaitanya – We do have offerings for Educational institutions through the Microsoft Educator Grant Program, which implement a form of this feature.

@A Ra – In EA, if you have set up departments, you can access that tab in the portal, select “Edit”, and add a spending quota within that area. You will then receive emails at 25% usage, 50% usage, 75% usage and 90% usage.

Thanks again for engaging!

-Adam (Azure Billing Team)

under review ·

AdminAzure Billing Team (Admin, Microsoft Azure) responded · June 23, 2015

Update:

@Chaitanya – We do have offerings for Educational institutions through the Microsoft Educator Grant Program, which implement a form of this feature.

Thanks again for engaging!

-Adam (Azure Billing Team)

under review ·

AdminAzure Billing Team (Admin, Microsoft Azure) responded · June 11, 2015

Hi there,

The good news is that we are integrating billing alerts and notifications into our platform. In using billing alerts, you will receive emails upon reaching certain usage thresholds in a given month.

If there are any other concerns, please continue to express them here. The Azure billing team and I will do our best to let these voices be heard in the rest of our organization.

-Adam (Azure Billing Team)

under review ·

Asim Mitra responded · December 09, 2013

Thanks for your feedback. We completely understand the importance of the ask and that it is very important for us to deliver this feature as soon as possible. We are looking into this.

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Anonymous commented · June 08, 2019 13:08 · Flag as inappropriate

AtOmXPluS
Anonymous commented · May 29, 2019 02:49 · Flag as inappropriate

Why 4 Years almost nothing happend and why just pay as you go customers!!??
Koen Janssens commented · May 07, 2019 23:39 · Flag as inappropriate

Crazy that this feature is still not available after 4 years!
Ryan commented · April 18, 2019 14:39 · Flag as inappropriate

A lack of spending limits is preventing me from exploring Azure since my trial is expired. One month isn't enough time to learn much and I can't take the risk of authorizing unlimited spending on a pay-as-you-go subscription to continue learning. There's too much of a risk that I'll make a mistake and be responsible for costs that I can't afford.

I'm disappointed today because I found an awesome blog post with an ARM template that had me excited about trying out Azure Functions, but I'm not willing to add an unlimited spending subscription to my account to try out something that I expect to cost less than $1.

Please give an update on this. It's been 3 years and spending limits have been enabled for several other subscription types. Is this still planned?
Greg commented · April 16, 2019 15:50 · Flag as inappropriate

Any updates? Without this feature, there is too much downside risk to using Azure. One misclick could cost 1000’s of dollars.
Anonymous commented · March 18, 2019 20:49 · Flag as inappropriate

Is there any update on this for EA and CSP? We had a customer run up a $12k bill the other day that could have been easily avoided!
John commented · March 09, 2019 08:24 · Flag as inappropriate

I really want to use Azure but I can't give you unlimited access to my bank account.
You're forcing people to go elsewhere, this can not make business sense.

Microsoft should also be embarrassed by how long this has been "Planned".
Jason Milczek commented · January 30, 2019 18:33 · Flag as inappropriate

Almost 3.5 years and nothing?!?! Is this backlog in Bill Gates' basement?
Joel commented · October 11, 2018 10:42 · Flag as inappropriate

This exists for MSDN subscriptions so you have the technology. Why is this not be implemented?
Michael de Selincourt commented · October 05, 2018 05:38 · Flag as inappropriate

The above update is 3 years old... what's the best supported way to prevent unexpected costs on Azure PAYG?
Rama Indrawan commented · October 04, 2018 23:56 · Flag as inappropriate

I know for sure that the BUDGET which gives us ability to send emails at certain thresholds are here, I am using it now from the Portal
Luke Maslany commented · August 24, 2018 09:22 · Flag as inappropriate

It has been almost three years - did this ever make it onto the road-map?
Vivek commented · June 08, 2018 17:38 · Flag as inappropriate

When will this feature arrive? as it stands the upper limit is still unlimited.
Craig Humphrey commented · April 12, 2018 22:02 · Flag as inappropriate

+1 for Enterprise Agreement based Azure Subscriptions.

And for some way to track/alert cost against a specific user.
E.g. user creates huge VM and leaves it turned on, racking up a huge bill.
Malon Körber commented · March 06, 2018 02:39 · Flag as inappropriate

"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."

Why not EA Customers? I don't want to build a specific department and an account for each subscription. I need to configure the spending limit on the specific subscription.

I don't need a hard quota, I am even happy with a softquota on subscription level!
When doing this for Pay-As-You-Go, why not for EA-Customers?
Woof commented · October 11, 2017 15:32 · Flag as inappropriate

Hello? Year after year I send my customers to other solutions...
Kam Salisbury commented · September 12, 2017 18:30 · Flag as inappropriate

+1 A sudden bill over an expected amount is an unacceptable outcome. Please implement this.
Anonymous commented · July 21, 2017 05:51 · Flag as inappropriate

Come on Microsoft, the ability to delegate a capped spend to departments or projects is pretty fundamental to controlling costs & making azure viable in a range of scenarios. You may have bottomless money bags but most of us don't.

It's clear from the thread that there is customer demand for this feature, so why has there been no response for almost 2 years?
No way commented · July 03, 2017 11:11 · Flag as inappropriate

I'm not going to even touch Azure again if there's no option to set a hard spending limit (or - preferably - buy some virtual currency with a real money and then use that virtual currency, instead of risking with my credit card).

Right now, I'm pretty sure I can order a service that costs $45 000 a month (cognitive services) with a one miss-click, which is outrageously dangerous, to say the least.

Maybe there is some confirmation page after that one click, I don't know, I'm not going to check this out, I'm not going to go bankrupt.

Never again Microsoft, your service is just too much risk to take.
Anonymous commented · May 25, 2017 06:17 · Flag as inappropriate

Without a spending cap, the risk of pay-as-you-go is too high. I would prefer to set and adjust some limit, even if it's quite high at times, to suspend operations temporarily in cases of unanticipated (potentially malicious) surges in activity.