title: Azure Virtual Machine Billing
body: <p>I dont know if this is the right place, but I am assuming MSFT staff also answers these questions since the azure portal links to StackOverflow?</p>
  
  <p>Questions:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>I understand that Azure no longer bills me for a VM so long as it and its cloud service are stopped.  But what is unclear is am I going to be billed for the Cloud Service itself?  For example say i create a Virtual machine and by doing so i get a cloud service for it (with ip).  Then I turn off that virtual Machine and the cloud service.  Do i still get billed for the cloud service even though everything is turned off?</li>
  <li>Continuing on the question above.  Do i get billed storage fees for the Virtual Machines filesystem.  Currently windows vms are around 120GB in size.   How does the billing work out for virtual machines?  And how does it change if the machine is turned off. </li>
  <li>How are Custom Images billed?  Say i create my Windows 2012 Master image with IIS and a few other components installed.  Then I create my own Image so that I can bring up vms more rapidly.  Where is the VM image stored?  Will it be in my blob container under VHD's?  And again will microsoft charge me to store this image?  Will it be the full 120+ GB or the actual size of the image stored. </li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Sorry to ask these questions.  Tried my best to google around and all i could find was a post by Scott Gu where he stated VMs wont be billed and very little detail beyond that. </p>