In dynamic environments — especially during autoscaling, testing, or infrastructure changes — it's common for load balancers to remain provisioned after their backend resources have been decommissioned. When this happens, the load balancer continues to incur hourly charges despite serving no functional purpose. These inactive resources often go unnoticed, particularly in dev/test environments or when deployment pipelines fail to include proper cleanup logic. Over time, the accumulation of unused load balancers contributes to unnecessary recurring costs with no operational benefit.
Azure Load Balancer (Standard SKU) is billed based on:
Cost persists even when there are no active backend pool members, and no traffic is flowing.
