Unexpected $12k Azure bill from Microsoft for Startups workloads. Is a refund/credit possible?
Hi everyone,
I’m looking for advice from people who have experience with Azure for Startups / Azure billing, especially unexpected high bills.
Our company is enrolled in Microsoft for Startups, and we were working toward the workload requirements for additional Azure credits. We created multiple workloads for this purpose.
We recently discovered that our Azure bill for the period was around ₹10–11 lakh (~$12k USD).
The surprising part is the cost breakdown. The major contributors were:
- Azure Virtual Enclaves: ~₹5.58 lakh - $5580
- Azure Firewall: ~₹4.19 lakh - $4190
- Azure Bastion: ~₹0.97 lakh - $970
- PostgreSQL: ~₹0.48 lakh - $480
- Total: roughly ₹11 lakh - $11k
So approximately ₹10.7 lakh ($11k) came from Enclaves + Firewall + Bastion.
From what we're now understanding, the Enclave deployment provisioned a fairly substantial networking/security architecture around the workloads, including Azure Firewall, Virtual WAN/Virtual Hub, Firewall Policies, etc. The Activity Log shows the Azure Firewall creation/update operations being performed by Mission Enclave rather than individual user accounts.
Our original intention was simply to maintain the required Azure workloads for the Startup credit milestone. We were not expecting the workload requirement to result in this level of infrastructure cost.
We are now trying to understand:
- Are Azure Firewall and the other networking components automatically provisioned when using Azure Enclave?
- Is Bastion automatically created or is it an optional component?
- Is there a lower-cost way to satisfy the Microsoft for Startups workload requirement without deploying this entire networking architecture?
- Has anyone successfully obtained a billing adjustment, Azure credit, or refund for a situation like this?
- Should we open a normal Azure Billing Support ticket, Microsoft for Startups support ticket, or both?
- Is there anything specific we should include in the refund/adjustment request?
We're obviously going to be much more careful before creating any additional workloads. We haven't intentionally tried to consume resources at this scale; the high costs came from the infrastructure associated with the deployment.
If anyone has dealt with Microsoft in a similar situation, I'd really appreciate advice on the best way to approach the billing support case and whether a refund/credit is realistic.