Yes — Azure AI Search has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes free tier: 50 MB of storage per service, shared infrastructure and up to 3 indexes on the Free tier. A credit card is required at signup.
About
Azure AI Search, also referred to as Foundry IQ, is an enterprise search and retrieval service for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications. It supports keyword search, vector search, and hybrid search in a single service, and includes knowledge sources and knowledge bases for connecting data from SharePoint, Azure Blob Storage, Microsoft OneLake, Fabric IQ, Work IQ, MCP, and the web.
The service includes built-in indexers for Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Azure Blob Storage, and Microsoft SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, plus import and transformation tooling in the Azure portal for parsing, chunking, enrichment, and embedding. The pricing page states that Azure free for up to 30 days is available through an Azure account, while the product itself is billed through Foundry IQ pricing for serverless agent workloads.
- Keyword, vector, and hybrid search
- Knowledge bases for reusable agent context
- Built-in indexers for Azure data sources
- Import wizard for RAG pipelines
- Document-level ACL synchronization
- Available in 30+ countries and regions
Free Tier Value
This page does not show any concrete free tier, credit, or trial for Azure AI Search, so there is no defensible monthly free-tier value to estimate. The pricing link points to a separate pricing page, but with no extracted free-tier bullets or published allowance here, the offer should be treated as having no measurable free tier on this page. A credit card requirement is not stated either way.
What's included in the free tier
- Free tier: 50 MB of storage per service, shared infrastructure.
- Up to 3 indexes on the Free tier.
- No hourly search-unit charge on the Free tier.
See Azure AI Search pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Azure AI Search
- Serverless plans for agent workloads
- Knowledge bases reusable across agents
- Built-in parsing, chunking, enrichment, and embedding
- Agentic retrieval with query planning and answer synthesis
- Document-level ACL synchronization and query-time trimming
- Connects to Fabric IQ, Work IQ, SharePoint, OneLake, Blob Storage, data lakes, enterprise sources, MCP, and the web
Pricing extracted from Azure AI Search's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Azure AI Search free forever?
Yes. Azure AI Search has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
Does Azure AI Search require a credit card?
Yes. Azure AI Search asks for a card at signup, even for the free tier.
