Azure Storage Accounts pricing tips

[This is a work-in-progress page. It will be updated as new useful information becomes available.]

Warning: This page reflects prices at the time it was written and may contain typos or calculation errors. For current, official pricing, see Azure pricing.

Azure Storage Accounts have become more complex as features, performance levels, and pricing options have evolved. Storage remains a foundational Azure service and is used in many solutions. This page is not a complete pricing reference; it provides an overview and practical tips to help identify the main cost drivers when comparing storage account options.

There are three main kinds of Storage Account:

• V1
• V2
• Premium

V2 is the default option when you create a Storage Account. V1 remains supported for existing workloads, but you can no longer create it in the Azure portal; use the Azure CLI instead.

Almost every action on a Storage Account has a cost. There are generally no fixed charges, except when you pre-allocate storage capacity to receive a discount. Outside of special cases, every operation and every unit of storage is charged—including listing stored files.

The general pricing pattern is: more performance, more costs. But could appears not always true. Consider Read and Write operation for Premium Blob. It is cheaper than Standard V2 Hot Blob. But this is because the storage cost of Premium is really higher compared to Standard V2 Hot. So, you pay more for storage but operations are cheaper. In general, you have to carefully consider if you need such performance or if your access/usage pattern fit with a premium level.

The following tables are a West Europe price snapshot in euros, captured on January 28, 2024. Blob operation prices are per 10,000 operations.

Blob

(F): Flat namespace
(H): Hierarchical namespace (Data Lake Storage)

Queue

Table

V1 vs V2

Compare V1 and V2 pricing carefully. If you do not need V2 performance or features, V1 may be more economical—especially for workloads with many transactions.

The following example uses the same application and number of daily transactions, with the storage account changed from V2 to V1. In this scenario, V1 is significantly less expensive.

Archive Tier

The archive tier requires some particular considerations. The storage cost is very low: 0.00167 €/GB compared to €0.0185 €/GB of the hot tier. 10 times less. But the write operations and, even more, the read operations are very expensive.

When a file is placed in Archive tier, it is no longer immediately available. This means you have to “rehydrate it” before accessing it (Link to docs). Essentially you have two option to rehydrate a file: copy the archived file to a new file with online tier OR change the archived tier to an online tier. However, in both cases, rehydrating could take several hours to complete. If are in a hurry, you can ask a high priority rehydration that “may complete in less than one hour”. So, it is crystal clear that archive tier must be used only for very infrequent access.

Rehydration is also a very expensive operation, composed by a read operation and a data retrieval operation.

For example, rehydrating a 50 GB file costs:

• Normal priority: €0.00072 + (50 × €0.0222) = €1.11
• High priority: €0.00780 + (50 × €0.1201) = €6.01