We run SAP AI Lab — two of us, one in ML systems, the other in enterprise information systems. No affiliation with SAP or Microsoft, just a shared habit of reading pricing APIs instead of press releases.
A while back a friend who manages an S/4HANA estate vented the standard complaint: "RISE is one contract, so why does my Azure bill still exist?" That question turned into the most useful arithmetic we've ever done, and it starts with a single flagship VM.
The number that changed our mind about reservations
Azure's largest memory-optimized HANA SKU, Standard_M832is_16_v3 (832 vCPU, 15,200 GiB RAM), lists at $163.856 per hour pay-as-you-go in East US. Same VM, reserved for one year: $834,816 prepaid for the term. Reserved for three years: $1,209,163.
Do the math against 730 hours a month and the discounts are 41.8% for one year and 71.9% for three years. For a two-node high-availability HANA pair that's roughly $239,200/month at list pay-as-you-go versus ~$67,200/month amortized on a three-year reservation. All figures are Azure Retail Prices API rows for East US, USD, retrieved as of 2026-11-08 — list prices, not your negotiated rate, but the ratios held across every SKU we queried.
The uncomfortable part: nobody is hiding this. The Azure Retail Prices API needs no authentication. This curl prints the exact rows we're quoting:
curl -s "https://prices.azure.com/api/retail/prices?\$filter=armSkuName eq 'Standard_M832is_16_v3' and armRegionName eq 'eastus' and type eq 'Reservation'"
One trap for first-time queriers: reservation rows report unitOfMeasure as "1 Hour", but retailPrice is the prepaid total for the whole term. Read it as a monthly rate and you'll understate your cost by three orders of magnitude in a slide deck, which we have seen happen.
Why the subscription quote is not the estate cost
The reservation lever matters even under RISE with SAP, because SAP procures the infrastructure and the subscription price is built on these same public meters. What the bundle does not cover, though, is everything outside the contracted systems:
- Custom apps, data lakes, and analytics running on your tenant land on your Azure bill.
- Satellite SAP systems under BYOL do too, and count toward your Microsoft consumption commitment.
- Implementation partner fees land on neither invoice — the classic line item nobody models.
And the entitlement pool (you'll see it called RPE in deal collateral) is genuinely opaque: as of 2026-11-08 SAP publishes no definition, no pool size, no conversion terms — it lives in order forms. Our blunt recommendation: get the pool's inventory, eligible products, expiry, and renewal impact in writing before signing. Most RISE cost overruns trace back to answers assumed for questions never asked.
Two smaller numbers that surprised us, same as-of date: the identical M-series SKU bills $38.27/hour more on Windows than Linux (~$335k/year on one always-on VM), and a 100 TiB backup repository moves from ~$2,130/month on hot blob storage to ~$101/month on archive — a 21x swing that one lifecycle policy fixes.
And a sizing warning, because reservations only help if the footprint is right: the HANA tier boundary is a step function, not a ramp. Doubling vCPUs from 416 to 832 costs about 3.0x, not 2x — the flagship SKUs carry a per-vCPU premium. The same asymmetry runs the other way on the SAP side: the FUE ratios in the service description guide (1 FUE = 5 core users, 30 self-service users) are locked into your order form for the full term, so an inflated headcount estimate stays oversized for years. Measure twice, subscribe once.
What we'd do on your Monday morning
Reserve the stable production core first — it usually carries the entire savings program by itself. Then reconcile your Azure export against the entitlement list quarterly: bundled systems already include SAP-managed backup inside the subscription, and we keep finding teams paying twice for the same protection ($80/month per HANA protected instance, incidentally, is the meter we checked).
The full walkthrough with all the pricing sources and checklists is on our site: RISE with SAP Cost Breakdown: What You Pay on Azure. It includes the exact queries for storage, backup, and egress meters, the eight-point reduction checklist, and the packaging context in our RISE with SAP on Azure guide if you want to know which systems the bundle covers before pricing them.
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