Who is this article for?

Users who want to understand Azure cosmos DB pricing.

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The Azure Cosmos database is required for automated email conversation filing when using the Ideagen Mail Manager Enterprise modern web app, and Microsoft charges a small fee based on your usage.

1. Understanding what the database stores

The Azure Cosmos database stores information about your email threads that will automatically save emails in that thread.

2. Understanding the pricing structure

Most of the cost (where it is minimal) is generally against the Service Bus. The Service Bus Standard plan is used and this comes with a base cost (which means there will still be a charge against the Azure subscription whether there is any traffic in the service bus or not). 

There is also resources used related to the Cosmos DB - which is a requirement of the Email Tracking setup since the email automation feature (web app only). 

Cosmos DB (as part of using the email automation feature with the modern web app) will incur Azure costs. Noting, all of our development, feature testing, and load/stress testing were done using the Serverless tier of Cosmos DB (not the free tier). Serverless is our officially recommended pricing model for Cosmos DB — it only charges for actual usage with no provisioned resources.

The Ideagen team can't predict the exact cost for the customer, as it heavily depends on traffic (specifically, how many emails are received by the automated mailboxes). However, we can share the costs from our load/stress testing as a reference. For 227,000 emails received on automated mailboxes (i.e., mailboxes with automation configured, where we monitor incoming emails and auto-save them to SharePoint if they match the defined conditions — a process that involves DB queries), the total cost was USD $5.35, broken down as follows:

• Service Bus: $2.71
• Cosmos DB: $0.84
• Functions: $0.65
• Storage: $0.44
• Log Analytics: $0.41
• Event Grid: $0.29
• Network Bandwidth: <$0.01

So, a very minimal cost based on the testing done on our end - only $5 for auto-saving 227,000 emails. 

3. Estimating your costs
 

For more detailed costings we recommend you talk to your Microsoft account manager.