Cost projection
The dashboard’s Projection panel shows two extrapolations of your monthly Azure OpenAI bill:
- Linear —
(last 24h cost) × 30. Simple; biased upward when a single burst hour drives the day. - Median —
(median per-hour cost across 24 buckets) × 24 × 30. Less swayed by bursts; closer to steady-state expectation.
Use median for budgeting and capacity planning. Use linear for “what’s the worst case if today’s traffic pattern keeps happening”.
What’s NOT included in the projection
The projection only covers Azure OpenAI token cost. Other Azure resources in your stack (Cosmos serverless RU, Storage, Function App executions, App Insights ingestion, and SignalR if you run Standard) aren’t reflected in it.
Your full monthly cost: two separate charges
Your bill has two parts that are billed independently:
- The per-seat plan license — Start $49 / Growth $99 / Professional $199 (plus metered overage if you exceed your seat quota past the 7-day grace), billed through Azure Marketplace on your Azure invoice.
- The Azure infrastructure in your own subscription — billed to you directly by Microsoft at standard rates, plus pay-as-you-go AI tokens (the projection above).
The plan license does not include the Azure infrastructure cost. Running your own isolated stack is what keeps your data private — and that stack carries its own Azure bill.
Estimated Azure infrastructure by plan
| Plan | Azure infrastructure (idle → light traffic) | + AI tokens | + Plan license |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start | ~$3–15/mo | pay-as-you-go | $49/mo |
| Growth | ~$10–30/mo | pay-as-you-go | $99/mo |
| Professional | ~$60–120/mo | pay-as-you-go | $199/mo |
SignalR Free, Cosmos Serverless, and scale-to-zero Functions (the Start/Growth defaults) have no idle cost. The standing-cost items are SignalR Standard (~$49.73/mo, the Professional default), provisioned Cosmos, and always-ready Function instances. See Resource tiers & sizing for the full per-component breakdown and how to tune each lever.