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While doing some research for a customer some doubts have rise regarding how the pricing on App Service plans work and what would be the best way to configure the ARM templates for different projects.

What I would like to confirm (and I don't think that Azure documentation is very clear on that) is if you pay only for the App Service Plan itself, even if you don't have any web apps running.

Imagining that I would like to have 2 web apps running on a Standard tier, is there any difference of having a different app service plan for each that I can later change independently for a single project? (e.g. one of the web apps may require more compute power in the future while the other doesn't).

And if by any change we remove the web apps from the subscription but still leave there the App Service Plan configuration... is anything paid in that case, even if there is no computing happening?

Thanks for the help everyone. Cheers

nunob
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1 Answers1

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TL;DR You pay for an App Service Plan, not for an App Service.

Looking at App Service Plans details, you see the number of Apps an App Service Plan can have.

  • A Free plan can have 10
  • A Shared plan can have 100
  • A Consumption plan for Functions can have 500
  • All other plans can have unlimited

Now for your question: you don't pay per App Service. You pay per App Service Plan. And this is regardless the number of apps. This is because you pay for the fact the plan is there, ready and waiting. You've reserved the resources specified in the tier you selected. The fact you're not using them isn't of influence.

Of course, consumption plan is the odd one out, since there you do pay only for compute used.

If you take a look at Pricing - App Service, you also see the pricing tables specify pricing for App Service Plans, not the App Services.

EDIT:

I would pay more for 2 service plans with 1 app each than 1 service plan with 2 apps on top

Yes.
Since an App Service Plan is an abstraction for (something like) a virtual machine, having 2 App Service Plans means having 2 virtual machines that are reserved for you.

EDIT2:
As @Juunas said in his comment:

you do pay per VM in your plan, so if you set scale out to 3 instances, you have 3 VMs running your app, so pay 3 times more than with scale out set to 1.

So 1 plan with 1 instance and 2 apps is cheaper than 2 plans with 1 instance and 1 app per plan. But if the 1 plan has 2 instances and 2 apps, you pay the same as in the 2-plans-1-instance scenario.

This is starting to get complex ...

rickvdbosch
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  • so according to that I would pay more for 2 service plans with 1 app each than 1 service plan with 2 apps on top, if we are not talking about functions? – nunob Oct 29 '19 at 11:37
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    Yes. Shared tier is different though, by the way. IIRC with that you pay per app. Otherwise it's per virtual machine in your app service plan. – juunas Oct 29 '19 at 12:10
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    Please have a look at my updated answer. So, what @juunas said . – rickvdbosch Oct 29 '19 at 12:12
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    Thanks for updating Rick, though I'd like to clarify that you do pay per VM in your plan, so if you set scale out to 3 instances, you have 3 VMs running your app, so pay 3 times more than with scale out set to 1 (default) – juunas Oct 29 '19 at 12:14