Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
A single profile can hold several endpoints, each with its own routes and custom domains, yet teams often create one profile per application, microservice, team or environment. Each extra profile adds another base fee while serving only one endpoint and often little traffic.
The pattern is common after migrating from Front Door (classic), where a profile had no base fee, and in estates where every dev and test environment gets its own Premium profile. Azure Advisor flags subscriptions that contain multiple Standard or Premium profiles with a small number of endpoints. In Microsoft's own pricing example, 80 single-service Premium profiles pay 26,400 USD a month in base fees, against 1,320 USD for the same services consolidated into four multi-endpoint profiles.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
Standard and Premium bill per profile plus usage; routing rules and the first 100 custom domains are free.
- Base fee
- A fixed charge per profile, calculated hourly; the pricing page lists 35 USD a month for Standard and 330 USD a month for Premium
- Requests
- Billed per 10,000 requests from clients to the edge by pricing zone, with a higher unit rate on Premium
- Outbound data transfer
- Billed per GB from edge to client and from edge to origin by pricing zone
- Endpoints per profile
- A profile can contain up to 10 endpoints on Standard and 25 on Premium, according to the Azure Advisor recommendation
How to detect
5 checks to find it in your estate.
- Review the Azure Advisor cost recommendation Consider using multiple endpoints under one single Front Door Standard/Premium profile
- List Microsoft.Cdn/profiles with a Standard_AzureFrontDoor or Premium_AzureFrontDoor SKU and count the afdEndpoints under each; profiles with one or two endpoints are consolidation candidates
- Group the candidate profiles by owner, environment and tier to find sets that could share a profile, for example all dev and test endpoints or all microservices of one application
- For Premium profiles, check whether they actually use Premium-only capabilities such as managed WAF rule sets, bot protection or Private Link to origins; profiles that do not could share a Standard profile
- In Cost Management, group Front Door cost by resource and meter to see how much of each profile's cost is the base fee compared with requests and data transfer
How to fix
4 ways to remove the waste.
- Consolidate endpoints that belong together into fewer profiles, within the endpoint limit per profile, and delete the emptied profiles to stop their base fees
- Keep separate profiles only where there is a real boundary, such as separate owners needing separate RBAC, a genuine need for Premium on some endpoints but not others, or reaching the endpoint limit
- Place dev and test endpoints in a shared Standard profile unless they must test Premium-only features
- When migrating several Front Door (classic) profiles, plan the target as a small number of multi-endpoint profiles rather than one Standard or Premium profile per classic profile
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.