What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB?

The solution was a new product, so we didn't have a cost of ownership before. The cost has not surprised us. It's not been an issue. If we were doing multi-master replication globally, the cost would increase significantly, but since we're not, it's manageable.

The pricing model aligns with our budget expectations, and we get a significant corporate discount from Microsoft because we're a partner.

The customer had a high budget, but it turned out to be a little bit cheaper than what they expected. I am not sure how much they have spent so far, but they are satisfied with the pricing.

It is cost-effective. They offer two pricing models. One is the serverless model and the other one is the vCore model that allows provisioning the resources as necessary. For our pilot projects, we can utilize the serverless model, monitor the usage, and adjust resources as needed.

Most customers like the flexibility of the pricing model, and it has not been an issue. They can start small, and the cost grows with adoption, allowing efficient management of the budget. Its pricing model has not been a concern at all for any of our customers. They understand it. It is simple enough to understand. Oftentimes, it is hard to forecast the RUs, but, in general, it has been fine.

Cosmos is cheaper than other solutions, but you must be smart about how you use it to keep costs down. We've made mistakes where the cost has increased more than we expected. You have the opportunity for it to be cheap or costly.

We pay for what we use, with the flexibility to reserve our use. Autoscaling is a premium option, but it helps when our database isn't in high demand. It provides flexibility in configuring our RUs, whether we want to do it at the database or container level. We have lots of options to configure and pay for the solution.

I am not aware of the price, but a challenge that I have faced occasionally is that running longer queries requires more RUs, so I have to ask someone with permissions to execute the queries.

Cosmos DB is a managed offering, so its cost is understandably higher. However, the value it provides aligns with its price, especially considering the discounts we receive. By purchasing reserved units for three years, we secure a significant discount, making the cost justifiable for our needs. Without this discount, the list price might be prohibitive for certain use cases.

The Cosmos DB pricing model, initially quite complicated, became clear after consulting with Azure Advisor, allowing us to proceed with confidence.

Its pricing is higher compared to solutions like Aerospike. However, it is justified because of the out-of-the-box features that are provided. The availability and resiliency that we have make it worth the price.

The pricing for Cosmos DB has improved, particularly with the new pricing for Autoscale. Previously, we were charged according to the busiest partition across all regions, but now, each partition is only charged for what it uses. This change has substantially reduced our costs.

The pricing and licensing model was initially difficult to understand, but as soon as I learned what was going on and how it was priced, it was pretty easy. What is more difficult is to understand how your system is going to behave specifically with the specific partitioning and querying that you are doing. Some of it is reactive because you cannot always predict what your customers are going to use in your product and in what specific way. So, while we have understood the pricing model, what we have not understood is which parts of our system would end up being the most expensive, costing us the most, or needing to scale the most. It is not necessarily an issue with Azure Cosmos DB itself. It is about understanding your individual software or our individual software when it is running on top of Azure Cosmos DB. It is about understanding what the behavior is going to be.

For the first three years of our company, we were able to run a production environment while spending less than $10,000 a month on our database. In contrast, our customers pay tens of thousands of dollars for the systems we integrate. Therefore, Azure Cosmos DB is a highly cost-optimized solution when used correctly.

With heavy use, like a large-scale IoT implementation, you could easily hit a quarter of a million dollars a month in Azure charges if Cosmos DB is a big part of it.

It is a relatively affordable solution.

The tool is not expensive. It is good for small use cases.

Microsoft provides fair pricing.

Right now, I have opted for the student subscription plan, for which Microsoft charges me around 100 USD. The pricing of the solution depends on the solution's usage.

Cost isn’t a big hurdle for us right now. The solution is not costly.

The solution is very expensive.

The pricing depends on the budget allocated to the client; for some, it can be high, and for some not high. But mostly, when the prices are moderate, they are not very high. I would rate it a seven out of ten.

As your data grows, the licensing cost can be expensive.

I rate Cosmos DB one out of 10 for affordability. It was expensive. We pay almost $1,000 daily to use it. It doesn't work traditionally — it works on resource units — so it's costly. It's a graph DB, which has advantages and disadvantages. Neo4j and MongoDB do the same thing, so it depends on your environment and costs. There are also issues with how you design it. You cannot create the traditional way like you would in other databases or graph databases. Typically, you would pay a fixed subscription yearly. With Cosmos DB, you pay monthly based on the source unit. That's what is expensive. It's harder to find designers and developers based on that. Many solution architects will set something up using the traditional way of thinking. Once you start using it expensively, it's challenging to change that. You end up with millions of records, so it's impossible to change all of them.

Pricing is one of the solution's main features because it is based on usage, scales automatically, and is not too costly. As usage scales up or down, the price moves accordingly. For example, we might have 30,000 users and the requirement is high so the solution automatically scales up. If the requirement lowers because the application isn't being used all the time, then the usage automatically grades down and so do our costs. Technical support is included as a free service. I rate pricing a seven out of ten.

Cosmos DB is expensive compared to any virtual machine based on conventional RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL. The reason it is expensive is that it is scalable, reliable and there is no latency. So while Cosmos DB is considered expensive, what a lot of people miss is that the cost includes reliability, scalability, and responsiveness. Cost also depends on the number of databases, number of replica locations, synchronization, number of queries per minute, and storage. Every client will have a different usage pattern. Overall, I would rate Cosmos DB a three out of five in terms of affordability. It is easy to over-provision, and it is easy to under-provision the solution.

The RU's use case determines our license fees. It fluctuates based on how many RUs we have. It's not a fixed-line.

Azure is a pay as you go subscription. Each month you utilize the solution and at the end of the month, based upon your utilization, you will get a report and invoice. It depends on the architecture and the services being used, how they are deployed and what the stories are. It is variable.

The cost very much depends on the task and on how much data is being processed and transferred.

The price of Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB could be a bit lower.

Cosmos DB is a PaaS, so there are no upfront costs for infrastructure. There are only subscriptions you pay for Azure and things like that. But it's a PaaS, so it's a subscription service. The license isn't perpetual, and the cost might seem expensive on its face, but you have to look at the upkeep for infrastructure and what you're saving.

For the cloud, we don't pay for the license, but for the on-prem versions, we do pay.

There is a licensing fee.

Cosmos should be cheaper. We actually intend to stop using it in the near future because the price is too high — and because of the stability issues.