We would ideally deploy our entire system using a script to provision and configure all the necessary Azure resources. This is helpful for clean per client deployments and also for qa/test deployments, however being limited to 1 free search service means having to have an expensive basic tier search service per qa/test deployment, or having to share a single shared free tier search service for qa/test/dev. Ideally we'd just be able to deploy 3 free tier search services.

An alternative to this would be a more finely graduated billing scheme based on usage (currently the cost of the search service dwarfs the cost of all the other Azure resources for a single deployment, strongly pushing us towards alternatives).