Tool profile
Microsoft cloud platform for compute, storage, data, AI, security, and enterprise infrastructure workloads.
Enterprises renewing Microsoft EA with Azure commit incentives
Microsoft's cloud tightly integrated with Entra ID, Microsoft 365, and hybrid Windows estates—default for many enterprise EA customers.
azure.microsoft.com/pricing/free-services (March 2026) describes free monthly amounts for 12 months from account creation on a large set of services for new customers, plus 65+ always-free services with recurring monthly caps for anyone with an account. Beyond those envelopes, pay-as-you-go rates from the Pricing Calculator apply—egress, managed SQL, and AKS control planes deserve explicit line items.
Pair Azure with AWS or Google Cloud quotes when leadership wants an apples-to-apples TCO, not slide-deck anecdotes.
Quick fit
Editorial take
Azure's pricing gets misread when the $200 onboarding credit, the 12-month promotional quotas, and the always-free services are treated like one permanent free plan. They are three different mechanisms and the copy should keep them separate.
What it does well
Primary use cases
Fit notes
Compare with
Pressure-test this pick against nearby alternatives.
Apache Kafka
Free planEvent streaming and event-driven architectures
Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput pipelines, pub/sub, and stream-processing ecosystems.
Choose Kafka when replayable event streams and ecosystem breadth matter more than the lightest possible operational footprint.
Pricing snapshot
Microsoft Azure's free-account page says new customers can start with a $200 credit for 30 days, then use monthly free amounts on 20+ popular services for 12 months, while 65+ services have always-free recurring monthly quotas. Outside those limits, Azure is standard pay-as-you-go by resource.
Arcjet
Free planApplication runtime security
Runtime security toolkit for modern applications and AI systems that helps teams enforce quotas, block bots, prevent prompt abuse, and ship app-level protections in code.
Closer to application-runtime security and abuse-prevention tooling than to classic perimeter appliances.
