ForgeFX’s Azure bill has stayed tightly clustered between $836 and $933 this year. The Cedar environment is the clear cost center, and compute plus storage drive nearly the entire bill.
91.1%of spending is virtual machines plus storage.
90.7%belongs to the Cedar resource group.
$902.51July projection based on $698.72 through July 24.
Monthly Spend
Azure-reported actual cost in USD. July is month-to-date.
$883.56Jan
$836.03Feb
$896.69Mar
$909.99Apr
$932.89May
$910.17Jun
$698.72Jul*
Completed monthJuly through the 24th
Average By Service
Average monthly share across January–June.
Virtual machines
$490.7654.8%
Storage
$324.4536.3%
App Service
$34.853.9%
Virtual network
$18.242.0%
Front Door
$16.851.9%
Other services
$9.741.1%
Resource Groups
Average monthly cost, January–June.
01Cedar environment$811.36 / mo
02Build storage$48.19 / mo
03ProposalBot$12.80 / mo
04Azure OpenAI apps$12.31 / mo
05HoloTrainer$10.23 / mo
Largest Resources
Average monthly cost, January–June.
01Cedar VM 05$333.20 / mo
02Cedar VM 05 system disk$259.04 / mo
03Cedar VM 02$163.66 / mo
04Build storage account$29.18 / mo
05Cedar VM 02 system disk$19.71 / mo
Build Storage: 12-Month Cost Trend
Completed months, July 2025 through June 2026. Includes the build storage account and its delivery services.
$20.03 → $72.12Monthly cost from July 2025 to June 2026.
+260%$52.09 more per month than one year earlier.
Apr 10 MigrationAzure automatically moved Classic CDN to Front Door Standard.
JUL 2025$20.03
AUG$20.37
SEP$22.02
OCT$24.45
NOV$22.96
DEC$23.24
JAN 2026$26.44
FEB$29.68
MAR$31.27
APR$58.01
MAY$71.61
JUN$72.12
The April jump was mostly a new fixed platform charge, not a traffic surge. Azure automatically migrated this profile from Classic CDN to Front Door Standard on April 10. The Standard base fee was $22.53 for partial April, $35.00 in May, and $33.87 in June; data transfer was only about $3 per month. July is still high at $28.62 through July 24, projecting about $36.97 for the month.
Research: Ways To Lower Build Delivery Cost
No changes were made. Estimates use July’s projected $36.97 Front Door cost, $35.98 storage cost, 2.205 TB stored, and current vendor list pricing.
1. Redirect To Azure Blob HTTPS
≈ $37/mo savings · lowest effort
Keep Azure Storage, retire Front Door, and redirect existing download links to the native Azure Blob HTTPS endpoint. This removes the fixed Front Door fee while preserving incoming links through a lightweight redirect.
Tradeoff: users ultimately see the Azure hostname. Direct Blob custom domains support HTTP only; Microsoft requires Front Door or CDN for custom-domain HTTPS.
2. Move Builds To Cloudflare R2
≈ $40/mo savings · preserves custom HTTPS
At current inventory, 2.205 TB in R2 Standard is roughly $32.92/month after the free allowance. Egress is free and current request volume is far below R2’s free operation limits.
Tradeoff: migration and URL cutover work, plus one-time Azure egress. Cloudflare supports production custom domains directly on R2 buckets.
3. Add Build Retention Rules
up to ≈ $18/mo · works with either platform
Half of the stored bytes—1.121 TB, or 50.8%—are older than one year. Deleting superseded builds or moving them to colder storage attacks the storage half of the bill without changing delivery.
Tradeoff: retention needs project-owner approval and a restore path for contractual or historical builds.
4. Keep Front Door, Clean Bad Requests
negligible cost savings
Roughly 90% of recent requests returned 4xx responses. Fix stale links, hotlinks, and bot traffic for cleaner telemetry and less origin noise.
The request meter is only pennies. This improves hygiene, not the $35 fixed base fee.
Cedar VM 05 and its system disk cost about $592 per month, or roughly two-thirds of the entire Azure bill. Cedar VM 02 and its disk add about $183 per month. Any meaningful reduction will come from checking whether these machines need their current size, runtime schedule, and retained storage—not from trimming the small app services.
