Azure API Management Cost: A Comprehensive Pricing Guide

Azure API Management is a powerful tool for securing, managing, and analyzing APIs. It's a crucial part of any cloud strategy, especially for businesses with complex API ecosystems.

API Management pricing is based on the number of API calls, with a free tier available for up to 100,000 calls per month. This makes it an attractive option for small to medium-sized businesses or startups.

To give you a better idea of the costs involved, let's break down the pricing tiers. The Developer tier starts at $100 per month for 100,000 API calls, while the Business tier costs $1,799 per month for 100,000 API calls.

Azure API Management offers four pricing tiers: Developer, Basic, Standard, and Premium. Each tier has its own set of features and pricing.

The Developer tier is ideal for non-production use cases and evaluations, with a price of ￥0.5022/hour (about ￥373.6368/month) per unit. It includes 10 MB of cache per unit, and is limited to a single scale-out unit.

The Basic tier is suitable for entry-level production use cases, costing ￥1.5386/hour (about ￥1,144.7184/month) per unit. It comes with 50 MB of cache per unit and allows for 2 scale-out units.

The Standard tier is designed for medium-volume production use cases, priced at ￥7.1794/hour (about ￥5,341.4736/month) per unit. It includes 1 GB of cache per unit and supports 4 scale-out units.

The Premium tier is intended for high-volume or Enterprise production use cases, with a price of ￥29.2229/hour (about ￥21,741.8376/month) per unit. It offers 5 GB of cache per unit and allows for 10 scale-out units per region.

Here's a summary of the pricing tiers and their features:

Note that the Premium tier also offers a triple 9 SLA-level, which is a high level of availability.

The APIM Consumption tier has a maximum of 5 gateways per subscription, 500 subscriptions per gateway, 50 APIs per gateway, and 1000 API operations per gateway.

The APIM Consumption tier has a total request duration of up to 30 seconds, a maximum buffered payload size of 2MB, and a maximum policy length of 4KB.

Here's a breakdown of the resource limits for the v2 tiers:

The developer portal in the v2 tiers has a maximum of 15 media files to upload, a maximum size of 500 KB for each media file, 30 pages, 30 widgets, and 350 KB of metadata per page and widget.

The Consumption Tier has its own set of resource limits, which are essential to understand before deploying your API.

You can have up to 10 scale units in the Basic v2 tier, but this limit increases to 30 in the Premium v2 tier.

The maximum cache size per service instance varies across tiers, ranging from 250 MB in the Basic v2 tier to 5 GB in the Premium v2 tier.

Here is a summary of the resource limits for each tier:

Each tier has its own set of maximum values for various resources, including APIs, API operations, subscriptions, and more.

The maximum number of APIs per service instance is 150 in the Basic v2 tier, 500 in the Standard v2 tier, and 2,500 in the Premium v2 tier.

You can have up to 1000 API operations per gateway in the Consumption Tier.

The maximum request duration is 30 seconds in the Consumption Tier.

The maximum policy length is 4 KB in the Consumption Tier.

The self-hosted gateway feature offers a flexible solution for managing APIs in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, allowing customers to manage all their APIs via a single API management solution.

This feature is ideal for organizations that need to deploy a containerized version of the API Management gateway component in the same environments where they host their APIs.

The self-hosted gateway feature is priced at ￥8.71 per hour per gateway deployment, making it a cost-effective option for businesses.

With this feature, organizations can continue to manage their APIs from an associated API Management service in Azure, ensuring seamless integration and management.

Azure Cost Management is a powerful tool that helps you track and manage your Azure costs. It provides a way to retrieve and work with Azure cost and usage data programmatically.

The Azure Cost Management API is currently only available to Azure Enterprise customers. You can use it to create custom filters and expressions to answer questions related to Azure resource consumption.

The Cost Management API provides three groups of operations: Dimensions, Query, and Exports. Dimensions allow you to retrieve data for supported dimensions for use in combination with scopes.

You can use the Query operation to retrieve aggregated cost and usage data based on a specific query. This data can be filtered, sorted, and grouped by any available dimension.

The Exports operation enables scheduling export of cost and usage data to blob storage. This data can be filtered, sorted, and grouped by any dimension before exporting.

Here's a summary of the three groups of operations:

The Azure Cost Management API has rich functionality, allowing you to retrieve and explore costs with multidimensional analysis and custom queries and filters.

You can define budget alerts in Azure Cost Management to be notified when usage or cost reaches or exceeds the budget set for that resource.

Users can also define alerts via the Azure Consumption API, giving them more flexibility in setting up notifications.

Budget alerts can be based on either a cost or usage budget, providing a clear trigger for when an alert should be generated.

Alerts are shown in the cost alert section of the Azure portal, making it easy to keep track of notifications.

Budget recipient lists are also notified by email when alerts are generated, ensuring that relevant parties are informed.

You can use the API endpoint to retrieve details of new alerts, providing a convenient way to access and review notification history.

When retrieving and defining alerts via the API, you'll get a detailed response that includes the full details of the alert. This response provides a comprehensive overview of the alert, making it easier to understand and manage your Azure API Management cost.

The response includes the type of budget, which is crucial in determining the alert's scope and relevance. The reason for the alert is also clearly stated, helping you identify the root cause of the issue.

The time period, alert condition, threshold, and current spend are all essential details that are included in the response. This information allows you to analyze the alert and take corrective action if necessary.

Here are the details included in the alert response:

The Post Endpoint is a crucial part of API interactions, and understanding its parameters is essential for effective communication.

The POST API Endpoint is a specific type of endpoint that allows for data to be sent to a server, and in our case, it's used for forecasting.

Note the two parameters at the end, which indicate whether to return the actual costs in the defined period together with the forecast.

When you receive a response, you'll want to know what exactly it's telling you. A sample response provides detailed information about the alert, including the type of budget and reason for the alert.

The response breaks down the alert into key components, such as the time period, alert condition, threshold, and current spend. This helps you quickly understand the context and implications of the alert.

Here are the specific details you can expect to see in a sample response:

This information allows you to take prompt action and make informed decisions based on the alert.