Azure Container Apps (Consumption, Dedicated, Dynamic Sessions)
- Free allowance
- Per subscription per month: 'The first 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds, and 2 million requests per subscription per month are free.'
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- volume-quota180,000 vCPU-seconds and 360,000 GiB-seconds a month per subscription
- Evidence
- documented8 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-05checked 2026-11-04 (live); stale on 2026-12-05
| Free tier | per subscription per month: 'The first 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds, and 2 million requests per subscription per month are free.' unit seconds; metered on wall-clock |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
not stated |
| Binding | volume-quota 360,000 GiB-seconds at 512 MiB is 720,000 seconds, 8.3 days, and the vCPU grant at a quarter core is 720,000 seconds, so both meters run out together in the second week. |
| Identity | card an Azure subscription with a card; the free grant is a monthly allowance on a paid subscription |
| Egress | per the general Azure bandwidth page, the first 100 GB a month of internet egress is free for all customers in all regions; beyond it from North America and Europe the next tier is USD 0.087 per GB, then USD 0.083, 0.07 and 0.05 per GB free allowance: 100 GB per month |
| Per-object cap | not applicable: the unit is a replica |
| Retention | ephemeral storage per replica; no persistent disk in the free allowance |
| Interface | cli Azure CLI extension, Azure portal or ARM templates, per the Container Apps overview: "Use the Azure CLI extension, Azure portal or ARM templates" |
| Tooling | the Azure CLI extension, per the Container Apps overview: "Use the Azure CLI extension, Azure portal or ARM templates" |
| Reliability | an application can scale to zero with no usage charge; a configured minimum replica bills at a reduced idle rate |
| Notes | The page's per-unit prices render as '-' in the extracted text, so no rate is recorded. Arithmetic from the free grant only: 0.25 vCPU and 512 MiB always-on is 648,000 vCPU-seconds and 1,296,000 GiB-seconds a month, so the grant covers 720,000 seconds of it, 8.3 days. |
| Evidence note | documented the grant, the active-replica thresholds and the scale-to-zero rule were read on the pricing page |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 8
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-02 | azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/container-apps/ | not published |
| 2026-10-22 | azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/container-apps/ | 'The first 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds, and 2 million requests per subscription per month are free' and 'A replica is active when vCPU usage is above 0.01 cores or when data received is above 1,000 bytes per second', quoted |
| 2026-10-24 | azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/container-apps/ | quoted: 'The first 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds, and 2 million requests per subscription per month are free.' |
| 2026-10-24 | azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/container-apps/ | quoted: 'A replica is active when vCPU usage is above 0.01 cores or when data received is above 1,000 bytes per second.' |
| 2026-11-04 | azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/ | the first 100 GB a month of internet egress is free |
| 2026-11-04 | azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/ | after the free first tier, USD 0.087 per GB is the next tier from North America and Europe |
| 2026-11-04 | learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-apps/overview | Container Apps is managed with the Azure CLI extension, the portal or ARM templates |
| 2026-11-04 | learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/container-apps/overview | the overview names the Azure CLI extension, the portal and ARM templates |
More fields 15
| keep rate | 1.0 |
|---|---|
| billing model | per-second |
| shape | {"vcpu": 0.25,"ram_gib": 0.5,"disk_gib": null,"gpu_class": null,"gpu_count": null} |
| session cap | {"wall_clock_min": null,"idle_reap_s": null,"restart_required": false,"note": "scale to zero unless a minimum replica count is set"} |
| network out | {"allow_outbound": true,"allow_inbound_listen": true,"ports": "ingress on the container port with an Azure-provided hostname","static_ip": false,"ipv6": false,"per_session_bytes": null} |
| price note | One of them applied the credit to the wrong meter |
| free tier kind | monthly-grant |
| catalogue field warning | free_monthly_credit conflates a recurring grant with a one-time grant divided by a month |
| granularity | {"min_billed_s": 0,"rounding_s": null} |
| burst x | 3.5 |
| burst bill | min 1 h |
| term | monthly |
| m10h usd | 0.0 |
| m24h usd | 0.0 |
| price arithmetic | free inside the monthly grant; 8.3 days of a 0.25 vCPU / 512 MiB replica exhausts both meters |
Unknown values 2
- chaining: a source was read and is silent on this field
- limits note: a source was read and is silent on this field
Corrections
- 2026-10-22 Azure's free compute is a monthly vCPU-second allowance, and three records carried the credit instead