Azure Application Insights pricing 2026

The question "what does Application Insights cost per GB" has no direct answer, and that is the first thing to understand about the bill. A workspace-based Application Insights resource is a view over data sitting in a Log Analytics workspace. Microsoft is explicit that billing for ingestion and retention is done by the workspace where the data lives, and that all the Log Analytics pricing options, including commitment tiers, are available as a result. There is no separate Application Insights data meter to look up.

In practice that means application telemetry lands on the same Analytics Logs meter as infrastructure logs: $2.30 per gigabyte in East US, after a free allowance of 5 GB per billing account per month. That allowance is shared across the whole billing account rather than granted per workspace or per app, so a second application does not get its own 5 GB.

It also means application telemetry counts toward a commitment tier. A workspace on the entry 100 GB per day tier ingests its Application Insights data at $1.96 per gigabyte rather than $2.30, and the app telemetry helps reach the tier alongside everything else in the workspace. Two workloads that would each miss the threshold alone can clear it together. The full tier ladder is on our Azure Monitor cost breakdown.

This is the most widely misstated fact in Application Insights pricing, and it is worth several thousand dollars a year to a mid-size estate. The 31-day figure that circulates is correct for Analytics Logs in general: 31 days of analytics retention is included in the ingestion price, and Microsoft notes that dropping a table below 31 days does not reduce cost because you have already paid for it.

Application Insights tables are not in that group. Microsoft's retention documentation carries a section headed "Log tables with 90-day default retention" which states that tables related to Application Insights resources keep data for 90 days at no charge, and lists them: AppRequests, AppDependencies, AppTraces, AppExceptions, AppEvents, AppMetrics, AppPageViews, AppPerformanceCounters, AppBrowserTimings, AppAvailabilityResults and AppSystemEvents. The Azure Monitor pricing page states the same allowance from the billing side, for both classic and workspace-based resources.

The practical consequence is that a team retaining a quarter of application telemetry has a retention bill of exactly zero, and only data held past day 90 touches the $0.10 per gigabyte per month meter. Each of those tables can also be adjusted individually, so you can hold AppRequests for a year while letting AppTraces expire at 90 days, without paying retention on the traces.

A standard availability test bills at $0.0005 per test execution in East US, and the result telemetry is billed as ingestion on top. The charge scales with frequency multiplied by locations, which is why it surprises people: adding locations to make alerting reliable multiplies the bill by the same factor.

Work it through on Microsoft's own recommended configuration. A five-minute test frequency from five locations is 12 executions per hour per location, so 12 x 24 x 30 x 5 = 43,200 executions a month, which at $0.0005 is $21.60 per URL per month. Ten monitored endpoints on that schedule is $216.00 a month before a byte of telemetry is counted. Microsoft recommends a minimum of five locations, allows up to 16, and caps you at 100 availability tests per Application Insights resource.

Two deprecations matter here. Multi-step web tests still carry a $10 per month meter but Microsoft lists them as deprecated. More urgently, URL ping tests retire on 30 September 2026 and existing tests are removed from resources on that date. Anyone still running them has to move to standard tests, and Microsoft's own migration guidance is blunt that this is a budget event: it warns that standard tests incur charges when enabled and tells you to review Azure Monitor pricing before turning the migrated tests on. A large estate of ping tests should be costed at $0.0005 per execution before it converts, not after.

These are our own arithmetic over the published East US rates above, not quoted prices. Every input is on the page, so you can redo them with your own volumes.

A small app sending 3 GB a month. Ingestion falls entirely inside the 5 GB per billing account free allowance, so it is $0. Retention is inside the 90-day free window, so that is $0 too. The total is nothing, provided nothing else in the billing account has already consumed the 5 GB. That caveat is the whole catch: the allowance is per billing account, so the second app in the same account usually finds it already spent.

A mid-size app sending 60 GB a month, 90-day retention. Ingestion is (60 - 5) x $2.30 = $126.50 a month. Retention is free because 90 days is the included window. Total $126.50 a month.

The same app retaining 12 months. Ingestion is unchanged at $126.50. At steady state you hold 720 GB, of which the most recent 90 days (180 GB) is free, leaving 540 GB on the retention meter at $0.10 per gigabyte per month, or $54.00. Total $180.50 a month. Note what the 90-day allowance is doing: on the commonly quoted 31-day assumption you would expect to pay retention on roughly 660 GB, and budget about $12 a month more than you owe.

A high-volume app sending 400 GB a month. That is about 13 GB a day, well under the 100 GB per day commitment floor, so it stays on pay-as-you-go: (400 - 5) x $2.30 = $908.50 a month. Reaching the entry commitment tier takes roughly 3,000 GB a month across the whole workspace, which is why app telemetry is usually pooled with infrastructure logs rather than given its own workspace.