How much is your Azure bill wasting?

Anyone whose work Microsoft account has the Reader role on at least one Azure subscription. You don't need to be a global admin, and for most tenants no admin consent is needed because the tool only asks to act as you, read-only. If your organisation requires admin approval for new apps, Microsoft will say so during sign-in and you can forward this page to whoever looks after your environment.

The connection is read-only and goes through Microsoft's own sign-in, so we never see your password and the tool can act only as you. It has no permission to create, change or delete anything, and it can only see subscriptions your account can already see. Access is short-lived by design, and an admin can revoke it at any time in Microsoft Entra under Enterprise applications.

Five things: Azure Advisor's cost recommendations, virtual machine power states, managed disks, public IP addresses, and one last-month spend figure per subscription from Cost Management. Everything is processed on the fly and discarded. Nothing is stored on our servers, and your contact details are only sent to us if you choose to share them to unlock the full report.

Four kinds of waste: reservation and savings plan opportunities where steady workloads could cost less on a commitment; machines Advisor reckons are oversized or barely used; VMs that were stopped from inside the operating system and are still billing for compute; and leftovers, meaning unattached managed disks and orphaned public IPs that bill every month while doing nothing.

Both are ways of paying less for compute you were going to use anyway. A reserved instance commits you to a specific machine family in a specific region for one or three years, in exchange for a discount that can pass 60%. A savings plan commits you to an hourly spend across compute generally, which is more flexible but discounts a little less. Neither changes your machines or performance, only the price, and Azure Advisor only suggests them where your usage history supports the commitment.

Reservation and right-size savings are Microsoft's own estimates from Azure Advisor, based on your last 30 days of usage, and they're usually quoted in your billing currency. The disk and IP figures are our rough list-price approximations, clearly labelled as such. Your actual rates depend on your agreement and region, so treat everything as a well-informed starting point that a proper review validates before anything changes.

A few reasons. Advisor refreshes its recommendations periodically, so the portal can be a little ahead or behind this scan. Cost Management throttles API requests aggressively, so spend figures occasionally don't come back and we show findings without them. And we scan the first ten subscriptions your account can read, so very large estates may need a full review to cover everything.

It means the sign-in worked but your account holds no role on any Azure subscription, which is common if you signed in with the wrong account or your access is limited to Microsoft 365. Ask whoever manages your Azure environment to grant you Reader on a subscription (it's read-only and takes a minute), or ask them to run the scan themselves.

There isn't one. The scan is free and the summary is yours either way. We ask for your contact details to unlock the full breakdown because this is how our Azure service starts conversations. If the findings are worth acting on we'd like the chance to quote for fixing them, and if they're not, you've lost a minute.