Azure Confidential Ledger reduced its price to approximately $3 per day per instance in March 2025 — roughly $90 per month. On its own, that sounds trivial. But the $90 figure is a floor, not a ceiling. A realistic production deployment runs multiple instances across environments and regions, and even a complete ACL setup still leaves the buyer without exportable proof packages, cross-cloud verifiability, or survivability if the Azure contract ends. This post walks through the actual cost of running ACL at a footprint that matches a regulated operation, and contrasts it with Certyo Managed at $24,000 per year.
The base math
Microsoft confirmed in its March 2025 announcement (see techcommunity.microsoft.com) that ACL pricing was reduced to ~$3/day per instance for the Ledger meter, plus a separate per-GB-per-month charge for Storage. Regional and subscription-specific rates apply. A single instance therefore runs around $1,080 per year before storage.
The problem is that $90 per month is the per-instance floor, not the deployment floor. A serious ACL deployment needs production plus staging, typically in more than one region for resilience, and usually a separate dev or sandbox instance. Four to eight instances is a common shape. At that footprint, the raw ACL fee is $4,300 to $8,600 per year — still modest, but no longer the $90/month headline.
What the price doesn't include
The instance fee covers the ledger compute and storage. It does not cover everything a regulated buyer actually needs:
- Evidence exports — ACL has no branded PDF proof packages or portable JSON manifests that an external auditor can verify offline. Every verification requires API access.
- Cross-cloud verifiability — ACL proofs live inside Azure. If your auditor, regulator, or counterparty isn't in Azure, they can't independently verify without you granting them access.
- Survivability — ACL exists only as long as your Azure contract exists. AWS already retired QLDB in July 2025 (see infoq.com). Vendor-managed immutability has a business-decision failure mode.
The real total cost of ownership
ACL's raw fees look cheap next to Certyo's $24,000 Managed SKU. But total cost of ownership isn't raw fees. It's what you spend to close the gaps. For ACL, the gaps are export tooling (build yourself), cross-cloud verification (build yourself or restrict audit scope), and survivability planning (archive strategy, replacement contract). At an enterprise scale, those gaps typically cost more engineering time than the ACL fees themselves.
The practical test is simple. Take the $90/month headline, multiply by a realistic instance count, add an estimate of the engineering hours required to ship an auditor-ready export flow, then layer in the risk-weighted cost of a future vendor transition. The number that comes out is the one that belongs in a CFO meeting — not the monthly fee that belongs on a marketing page.
What regulated buyers actually want
The buying committee for audit-evidence infrastructure is almost never "the cheapest hash service." It's a triangle of auditor comfort, CFO predictability, and engineering maintainability. ACL's $3/day doesn't answer any of the three directly. The auditor wants a portable proof artifact. The CFO wants an annual line item they can forecast. The engineer wants something that still works if the cloud relationship changes.
Certyo Managed at $24,000 per year is not competing with ACL's base fee. It's competing with the engineering and risk a complete ACL deployment requires once you include everything the auditor, finance, and engineering all need. That comparison changes the arithmetic.
When ACL is the right answer
Honesty matters. ACL is the right tool for some buyers — specifically these:
- Pure-Azure shops with no external audit scope — If your records never need to be verified outside Azure and your auditor has native Azure access, ACL's platform integration is a real advantage.
- Small-footprint deployments — If you truly need one or two instances and no exports or cross-cloud story, the $90/month floor is genuinely attractive.
- Teams already committed to TEE-based architecture — ACL's TEE hardware isolation is a differentiator for threat models where the attacker is assumed to compromise the cloud operator itself. Certyo doesn't compete there.
Sources and further reading
Microsoft pricing page: azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/confidential-ledger. ACL product page: azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/azure-confidential-ledger. March 2025 price reduction announcement: techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azureconfidentialcomputingblog/price-reduction-and-upcoming-features-for-azure-confidential-ledger/4387491. QLDB sunset context: infoq.com/news/2024/07/aws-kill-qldb. For a side-by-side with Certyo, see our Certyo vs Azure Confidential Ledger comparison page linked from /en.
The $90 monthly ACL fee is honest; the $90 deployment total is not. Real regulated footprints cost more, and the gaps ACL leaves — exports, cross-cloud proof, survivability — are exactly what auditors ask for.