Microsoft Announces New Pricing for Azure SQL Reporting Services
Microsoft announced earlier this month that they were changing the way Azure SQL Reporting was being charged.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/02/01/sql-reporting-services-pricing-update.aspx
I believe this is due in large part to a lot of pressure from the general public that they were just not going to use it at the current pricing levels. Simply put it just did not make sense. With the original pricing, you were essentially paying $0.88/hr for 200 reports. Sounds fairly inexpensive until you start running the math..
24 hours/day * 30 days/month * $0.88/hr = ~ $630.00/ month
Ouch! Especially if all you need is a smaller scale instance in order to server up reports for a web site. Additionally, remember that this is for 200 reports/hour. If you go over those 200 reports then you are charged another $0.88 . Double ouch! This shocked quite a few people when the original pricing was announced because those of use in the beta hadn’t really heard anything about pricing yet and had assumed that maybe it would be baked into the SQL Azure pricing or that possibly would entail you spinning up an app server.
Now about 6 months later, it seems that Microsoft has figured out that it just wasn’t working and has revamped their pricing model. So there are a couple of points that you need to follow.
1. Base price is $0.16/hr
2. Report base is 30 reports/hr
With the new pricing schema you now have a lot more flexibility depending on how many reports you would actually need to consistently run. So baseline for the new model will be
24 hours/day * 30 days/month * $0.16/hr = ~ $115.00/month
This is a LOT better than the previous one. You are getting a greater than 80% decrease, which should allow a lot more people to join in. Of course, I have yet to dive in an see what the pricing implication are for running a report with multiple subreports….are those counted as one report or a several reports? Once I find that out then I will provide some edits to this post outlining all the wrinkles involved.
All in all, Good Move Microsoft!
Ninja