Running a Production Web App on Azure for (Nearly) Free

February 2, 2025

Enterprises often over-provision cloud infrastructure for workloads that don't need it. Azure Container Apps' consumption plan changes that calculus for low-to-moderate traffic web applications.

Why scale-to-zero matters

When a Container App has zero replicas running, you are not billed for compute. For a marketing site, an internal tool, or an early-stage product, this can mean a genuinely production-grade deployment for single-digit dollars a month.

The trade-off is a small cold-start delay on the first request after idle. For most business use cases, that trade-off is well worth the savings.