Costs

It's important to understand how Workspaces incur costs, so you can anticipate and take the right steps to prevent overspending.

So how do Workspaces incur costs? myDRE follows a pay-as-you-go structure. This means that the more you use, the more you pay; just like an energy bill. Instead of kWh of electricity, you pay for the storage and the virtual machines that you use over time.

Your workspace incurs costs for:

• File storage, you pay a certain amount per gigabyte per month.

• VMs, you pay a certain amount per hour that they are running. The larger your VM, the higher the hourly rate.

• Data flow and Azure Threat Protection, makes sure that data is checked for security vulnerability when it comes in, goes out, or when it's just sitting around.

In general, costs are dependent upon your usage: the more you use, the more you eventually pay. In this article , we first present a cost estimator tool with which you can estimate your workspace costs in advance. Afterwards, we provide more information on each of the different cost components. 

When you already have a workspace, you're able to keep track of your costs using  the Budgets tab.

There is a cost estimator tool on myDRE support that can help you estimate what your intended workspace would cost. Based on a number of inputs, the estimator will provide you with an approximate amount that you'll spend each month. All the components are included, except Data flow (which is free for workspaces under SURF contract).

Then a final question remains: how do you keep track of costs?

There's a native way in the myDRE portal to do this, in the workspace under the "Costs" tab. There you can create a budget, which is an intended amount of money you want to maximally spend each month or year. You can directly set up e-mail notifications at different % of the budget. Please keep in mind that this is not a hard limit to your spending. If you continue storing data and using VMs after you've reached your budget, the costs will keep incurring.

The other way to keep track is via the Azure portal. This portal is more complex, and gives an insight into the back-end of your workspaces. In the Azure portal, you can browse to the resource group that corresponds to your workspace. There, an overview provides a dashboard with loads of information about costs. You can look at different periods of time and the different resources. Keep in mind that the figures in this portal do not yet include VAT(btw).