How to tell the difference between free-tier Azure CosmosDB account and the paid one?

Question

When I create a new account using Azure portal, I can see "Apply Free Tier Discount" option. And this option is absent when there is an existing free-tier account in the current subscription.

But after the account is created I can't tell if it's free-tier or not. Can't find any difference between free-tier and not free-tier accounts either in the account properties in Azure portal either in ARM template auto-generated for the account. All templates have the same property "databaseAccountOfferType": "Standard". Somehow MS knows when one free-tier for a subscription already exists. So there is some indicator somewhere inside, but it's hidden from Azure portal users.

And another question: can I create a free-tier account using ARM template? If so, how can I be sure that I created a free-tier account if I use ARM template?

Mark Brown recently shared an ARM template for this on Twitter: gist.github.com/markjbrown/03d3640a2d915f5899b84e5927e4e589 — juunas

Gaurav Mantri Gaurav Mantri · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-26T13:03:36

To find out if an account is created in free tier or not, you could fetch the properties of that account. I tried by executing REST API from here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/rest/api/cosmos-db-resource-provider/databaseaccounts/get.

Under properties node, you will see a property called enableFreeTier. That property's value will be true for free account and false for other accounts.

This is what I see when I run the REST API:

  "properties": {
    "provisioningState": "Succeeded",
    "documentEndpoint": "https://account.documents.azure.com:443/",
    "ipRangeFilter": "",
    "publicNetworkAccess": "Enabled",
    "enableAutomaticFailover": false,
    "enableMultipleWriteLocations": false,
    "enablePartitionKeyMonitor": false,
    "isVirtualNetworkFilterEnabled": false,
    "virtualNetworkRules": [],
    "EnabledApiTypes": "Sql",
    "disableKeyBasedMetadataWriteAccess": false,
    "enableFreeTier": true,//True is returned for free account, false otherwise
    "apiProperties": null,
    "databaseAccountOfferType": "Standard",
    "consistencyPolicy": {
      "defaultConsistencyLevel": "Session",
      "maxIntervalInSeconds": 5,
      "maxStalenessPrefix": 100
    },

For the sake of completeness, copying @juunas's comment about ARM template.

Here's the link to the ARM template that can be used to create a "free" account: https://gist.github.com/markjbrown/03d3640a2d915f5899b84e5927e4e589.

How to tell the difference between free-tier Azure CosmosDB account and the paid one?

1 Answers