Their Azure startup account with about 10k in credits was apparently compromised, leaving roughly 550k in unauthorized Marketplace charges over 9-13 days. Azure support initially said no fraud was detected, and they had no MFA set up.
62signal
331reviewsi
A score out of 100. Negative and mixed reviews take points off, and so does having only a few reviews, so a handful of glowing reviews can’t beat a product many people like.
21% Positive13%66% Negative
What customers love, and what they don’tWhat customers noticed
Customer reviews (331)
Add your reviewShowing 23 reviews mentioning surprise bill Show all
They report about 2600 dollars in unexpected Azure charges and cannot find how to open a billing or support ticket, only seeing a refund option that loops back.
They report about 16,000 dollars in unauthorized Azure AI Foundry charges after an apparent account compromise and have a billing support case open.
They find Log Analytics very expensive, with bills exploding if a service like APIM or Firewall is misconfigured. Hard limits are awkward because they stop logs being written.
A Logic App polling every couple of minutes with the 90 day default run history stored about 5TB of hidden data, costing them a couple of thousand euros before they cut history to 7 days.
A wrong SQL audit retention setting on an Azure SQL Database sent terabytes of audit files to blob storage, and they only noticed from a bill of around 4K dollars.
They tried a free Databricks service on Azure and a week later their 5 dollar spending alert fired because of a NAT routing resource that was not visible in the portal. They deleted everything.
They enabled a DNS security policy only to log DNS queries and were hit by per-query charges they had not anticipated, on top of Log Analytics costs.
They find Log Analytics costs balloon, as even default monitoring rules and VM Insights log too much. They also note forgotten disks and backups add to the bill.
Their team got a $6k bill after a new Data Factory trigger created jobs back to its start date, and Microsoft only gave a one-time refund after admitting the documentation was poor.
Their $300 Azure starter credit lasted only 30 days, and they kept getting billed about $12 a month for Defender that they could not turn off even with AI agents and the CLI, so they killed the account.
They tried Azure experiments but were refused a trial and sent to a paid third party. Another client was charged 3,800 dollars incorrectly and support told them to raise a chargeback.
They raised Cosmos RU throughput to speed a data transfer and were hit with a $550 monthly bill.
They were caught out by Private Endpoints that did not auto-delete after deployment and kept billing. They now always set up cost monitoring.
They forgot to delete two Ultra disks with maximum IOPS for a week and got a 9k bill.
They had to export a 12tb disk years ago, the download failed three times, and the egress bill was painful.
They sent about 6 TB out of Azure back to their game servers and found the egress cost painful.
Defender was added without notice by their landing zones team and now makes up roughly 15% of their overall Azure costs. A fortnightly FinOps review caught it early.
They found suspicious sign-ins and a very large Azure bill, stopped all components and contacted Microsoft.
They were hit by an unexpected multi-thousand dollar Azure bill and needed a few weeks of phone back and forth with support before it was waived.
Their team was bitten twice by nonsensical Azure defaults, and they saw bugs and uptime problems acknowledged late, with very expensive proprietary services like Cosmos DB.
On a dev account they found cost management complicated, saw an attached disk start costing money, and had their subscription cut off without notice.
They call Azure terrible, with a confusing UI, quotas in three places, and Marketplace services that look native but bring surprise costs.
Common questions about Microsoft Azure
Is Microsoft Azure worth it?
Of the 180 reviews with a clear verdict, 21% are positive, 13% mixed and 66% negative. The praise mentioned most is easy to use. The most common complaint is poor support.
What do people like about Microsoft Azure?
The praise reviewers mention most: easy to use (11 reviews), helpful support (6 reviews) and reliable (6 reviews). For example: They use both Azure and AWS, find them similar on price, and say Azure is much easier to set up and navigate.
What are the most common complaints about Microsoft Azure?
The complaints reviewers mention most: poor support (42 reviews), surprise bill (22 reviews) and outages (21 reviews). For example: They use both AWS and Azure at work and find getting things done in Azure painful, with support worse than AWS.
What does the signal score of 62 mean?
It's how well reviewed Microsoft Azure is, out of 100. Negative and mixed reviews take points off, and so does having only a few reviews: a service needs plenty of them, compared with the most-reviewed services here, to reach the high 80s and 90s. It's worked out from reviews only, needs at least 5 of them, and updates as new ones come in.
What are the specs of Microsoft Azure?
Category: Cloud platform. Free plan: Yes.
Where do these Microsoft Azure reviews come from?
331 are quotes from Reddit, each linked to the original. Customer reviews are checked for spam before they appear. Every review, written here or quoted, is read as positive, mixed or negative.
