Azure Backup Cost Calculator
UK South pricing · VM, SQL Server, Azure Files · LRS / GRS / ZRS / RA-GRS vault storage · Storage-dominates breakdown
Prices from Azure Retail Prices API · UK South · GBP · Not affiliated with Microsoft
Storage usually costs more than the instance fee
Azure Backup pricing shows a per-instance fee and a small "plus storage" note. In practice, backup vault storage is typically 3–5× the instance fee. This calculator shows both — watch the storage line in the breakdown.
Protected instances
Vault storage redundancy
warningAzure Backup billing traps
Storage dominates the instance fee
The protected instance fee looks small — £7.55/VM/month. But vault storage for a 500 GB VM with 30-day retention is typically ~7.5× that. Teams that budget only the instance fee are surprised when the first invoice arrives.
GRS / RA-GRS is ~2× LRS
Geo-redundant storage is often enabled by default in deployment templates. For dev/test workloads that will never need cross-region restore, this doubles your storage cost for no operational benefit.
Retention multiplies vault storage
Extending retention from 30 to 365 days can increase vault storage by 10–18× (depending on daily change rate). A 12-month retention policy for SQL workloads with 10% daily change rate stores ~37× the active data size.
Soft-delete adds 14 days beyond policy
Soft-delete is enabled by default and protects against accidental deletion. It keeps data for 14 days after the retention policy expires. For large vaults, this adds a meaningful storage tail beyond your intended retention window.