Yes — Azure Container Apps has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans. The free plan includes The first 180,000 vCPU-seconds per subscription per month are free, The first 360,000 GiB-seconds per subscription per month are free, and The first 2 million requests per subscription per month are free.
About
Azure Container Apps is Microsoft Azure's serverless container service for running containerized applications, APIs, background jobs, event-driven workloads, and AI agents. It scales from zero to multiple replicas based on HTTP traffic or events, and supports managed identities, network isolation, private endpoints, Dapr, KEDA, and Azure Arc for deployment across cloud and edge environments.
The service includes a consumption plan, dedicated plan, flexible plan, and serverless GPU options. The pricing page states that the first 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds, and 2 million requests per subscription per month are free on the consumption plan, with scale-to-zero behavior and reduced idle billing when minimum replicas are configured.
- Serverless container execution
- 180,000 vCPU-seconds free monthly
- 360,000 GiB-seconds free monthly
- 2 million requests free monthly
- Scale-to-zero application model
- Consumption, dedicated, and flexible plans
- Serverless GPU inferencing support
- Dapr and KEDA integrations
- Azure Arc deployment support
Free Tier Value
This free tier has real monthly value because it includes recurring usage allowances rather than a one-time credit or trial. At the page’s paid consumption rates, the included 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GiB-seconds, and 2 million requests are worth about $7/month, and the offer renews every month with no expiration. A credit card is still required to create the account, so there is some signup friction even though the free allowance is substantial.
What's included in the free tier
- The first 180,000 vCPU-seconds per subscription per month are free.
- The first 360,000 GiB-seconds per subscription per month are free.
- The first 2 million requests per subscription per month are free.
See Azure Container Apps pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Consumption plan
- vCPU-seconds free grant
- 180,000 per subscription per month
- GiB-seconds free grant
- 360,000 per subscription per month
- requests free grant
- 2,000,000 per subscription per month
- Per-second billing for compute capacity
- Scales on demand
- Supports active and idle usage billing
- Includes requests-based billing
- Supports serverless GPU add-ons
- Can scale to zero when idle
Dedicated plan
- management
- per hour
- vCPU
- per hour
- memory
- per GiB-hour
- GPU
- per hour
- Single-tenancy guarantee
- Specialized hardware support
- Predictable pricing
- Billed by allocated vCPU and memory
- Includes management charges
- Supports workload profiles and autoscaling
Pricing extracted from Azure Container Apps's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Azure Container Apps free forever?
Yes. Azure Container Apps has a permanent free tier alongside its paid plans, though the allowance typically resets each month.
Does Azure Container Apps require a credit card?
Yes. Azure Container Apps asks for a card at signup, even for the free tier.
What is Azure Container Apps's free tier worth?
We estimate Azure Container Apps's free tier is worth about $7.00 per month. That maps to an FTV score of 49/100. See freetier.co/ftv for how we calculate it.
