Non-production environments such as development, testing, or staging often do not require the high availability, failover capabilities, and premium storage performance offered by the Business Critical tier. Running these workloads on Business Critical unnecessarily inflates costs. Choosing a lower-cost tier like General Purpose typically provides sufficient performance and availability for non-production use cases, significantly reducing ongoing database expenses.
Azure SQL Database instances are billed based on the selected service tier, compute size (vCores), and storage consumption. The Business Critical tier provides the highest availability and performance, using additional replicas and premium storage, but comes at a significantly higher cost compared to lower tiers like General Purpose. Selecting an unnecessarily high tier for non-production workloads leads to elevated expenses without proportional business value.
