Today, at PDC, Microsoft announced the pricing for Windows Azure, SQL Services and .NET Services. The business model is the one described in the table below:
| Windows Azure | SQL Azure | .NET Services |
| Compute: $0.12/hour | Web Edition (up to 1 GB relational database): $9.99 | Messages @ $0.15/100K message operations , including Service Bus messages and Access Control tokens |
| Storage: $0.15/GB stored | Business Edition (up to 10 GB relational database): $99.99 | |
| Storage Transactions: $0.01/10K | ||
| Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10/GB in and $0.15/GB out | ||
Windows Azure compute hours are charged only for when your application is deployed so while developing and testing your application you may want to remove the compute instances that are not being used to minimize compute hour billing. Windows Azure storage is metered in units of average daily amount of data stored (in GB) over a monthly period. Storage is also metered in terms of storage transactions used to add, update, read and delete storage data. These are billed at a rate of $0.01 for 10,000 (10k) transaction requests. Bandwidth is charged based on the total amount of data going in and out of the Windows Azure platform services via the internet in a given 30-day period.
Microsoft Partners receive an additional 5 percent promotional discount on Windows Azure compute, SQL Azure and .NET Services.
A more detailed description on the pricing model is available on the Windows Azure Blog.
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