Your first Azure cost review
Bring your Azure costs, resources, and recommendations into one workspace. Start with one subscription, review a completed scan, and decide whether the workflow is useful to your team. No demo call is required.
1. Create and confirm your account
Choose your organization name and create an account. Confirm your email using the message from FinOps Beacon, then sign in. New organizations receive a 14-day Business trial with no credit card required. The trial supports up to 20 Azure subscriptions and 15 users.
Start the trial when you are ready to connect Azure: the 14 days begin at account provisioning, rather than at your first scan. If a confirmation message is missing, check spam and use support for account-access help.
2. Connect Azure and choose a subscription
Choose Connect Microsoft in onboarding or Settings. Sign in with the work account that has access to the Azure subscription, review Microsoft's consent screen, and return to FinOps Beacon. Select the subscription you want to evaluate and save your settings.
FinOps Beacon performs read-only scans: it does not create, resize, stop, or delete Azure resources. Microsoft sign-in uses delegated access based on your existing Azure permissions and stores an encrypted refresh credential. The permission grant itself is not limited to a separate read-only OAuth scope. Review it with your administrator if needed.
If delegated consent is blocked or you prefer an independent identity with explicitly read-only roles, open Manual Azure credentials in Settings. Your Azure administrator can create an app registration and grant its service principal Reader, Cost Management Reader, and Monitoring Reader on the intended subscription. Enter the tenant ID, client ID, client secret, and subscription IDs in Settings. Secrets are encrypted before production database storage.
If no subscriptions appear or cost access is denied, check the signed-in Microsoft directory and your subscription roles. Some billing arrangements require additional cost-visibility settings controlled by the billing administrator. Do not email passwords, client secrets, or access tokens.
3. Run a scan and let it finish
Choose Run Scan. The scan gathers available inventory, cost history, metrics, and recommendations. Completion time depends on your environment and Azure's API limits; it can take several minutes or longer when Azure throttles requests. Review scan status and any reported warnings before relying on the results. Repeatedly starting scans will not speed up an in-progress scan.
The latest billing day may be partial, and Azure cost data can arrive later. Use completed days for spend comparisons. An empty recommendation list does not prove that your estate has no waste.
4. Review one opportunity with its context
Compare spend history with the resource inventory, then open Recommendations. Review the source, confidence, estimated savings, and resource details. Use the Azure Portal link to investigate dependencies and the appropriate action in Azure. Actions recorded in FinOps Beacon track your review; they do not make the infrastructure change for you.
Illustrative example only. This is not a customer result or a live product report.
- Finding
- A disk appears to be unattached.
- Cost context
- Review its available cost record or estimate and the scan date.
- Before acting
- Check ownership, backups, disaster-recovery needs, and retention requirements.
- Decision
- Keep it and record the reason, or follow your change process in Azure.
- Validation
- Compare later billing data after the change; an estimate is not realized savings.
Azure Cost Management and Azure Advisor already provide useful native cost analysis and recommendations. FinOps Beacon combines Azure information with resource context, review history, and related controls. Evaluate whether having that workflow in one place is worth the subscription to your team.
For a repeatable review, use our Azure cost optimization checklist. Investigating stopped machines? See which Azure VM charges can continue after stopping or deallocating.
5. Choose whether to continue
Open billing settings when you are ready to upgrade. Pro is $49/month for up to five subscriptions and five users; Business is $199/month for up to 20 subscriptions and 15 users. A paid plan is needed to continue running scans after an unpaid trial expires. Creating a trial does not automatically charge you. Review the final amount and terms in Stripe Checkout before subscribing.
Use Settings to manage billing, export or delete organization data, and disconnect Microsoft. You can also revoke delegated access through Microsoft or remove the manual service principal's access in Azure. See the privacy policy and data-retention policy for details.