Costs & Budgets

Costs & Budgets

How are costs calculated? Compute is charged based on VM size and running time. Storage is charged per GB per month. Data transfer out of Azure incurs charges after the free tier.

What happens when my budget runs out? Resources may be stopped or terminated. You’ll receive notifications as you approach your limit. Contact the RACE team to request additional budget.

Why are costs higher than expected? Common reasons: resources left running overnight, over-provisioned VM sizes, storage costs accumulating, or data transfer charges.

How do I check my costs? View the Budget Summary on the Dashboard for a quick overview, or go to Costs in the main menu for a detailed breakdown.

Saving Money

What’s the single best way to save? Stop resources when not in use. A running VM costs money every minute — a stopped one costs little to nothing.

How should I choose my VM size? Start with the smallest size that meets your needs. You can resize later if you need more power.

How do I save on HPC clusters? Set min nodes to 0 so the cluster scales down when idle. Nodes spin up automatically when jobs are submitted.

Should I delete resources I’m not using? Yes. Stopped resources may still incur some charges (e.g., disk storage). Deleting removes all charges. Back up your data first.