# Azure Pipelines

Official pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azure-devops-services/  
Category: paas · Isolation: vm

## Pricing regimes (raw)

- **Microsoft-hosted parallel jobs ($40 each/month, unlimited minutes)** (pool) [alt]
- **Microsoft-hosted macOS parallel jobs ($40 each/month, unlimited minutes)** (pool) [alt]
- **GitHub-hosted agents (pay-as-you-go per minute, macOS arm64, preview)** (sizes): macOS Standard (M1) 3 vCPU/7 GiB $3.72/h; macOS XL (M2) 5 vCPU/14 GiB $6.12/h [alt, beta]
- **Managed DevOps Pools (your Azure VMs + $15 self-hosted parallel job)** (resource) [alt]

## Features

Yes: persistent disk, volumes, idle auto-stop, custom image (Docker or snapshot), your own Docker/OCI image, full VM (own kernel), Docker inside, root, browser, egress allowlist, open internet, self-hosting, SOC 2, HIPAA, SSO, arm64, Windows, macOS, Python, Node.js, EU data residency, gVisor or VM (no shared kernel), inbound access rules, firewall inside (nftables), extra volumes

No: snapshots, memory snapshots, fork/clone, pause/resume, ≥24 h sessions, start from your own snapshot, nested virtualization, desktop GUI, computer-use API, code interpreter, browser + desktop control, anti-bot stealth, CAPTCHA solving, residential IPs, preinstalled agents, SSH, public IPv4, HTTPS preview URLs, custom domains, raw TCP inbound, static egress IP, BYOC, open source, GPU, GPU desktop, HTTP method/path egress rules, wake on request, live resize, live fork (no pause), memory fork, MCP server, automatic snapshots, snapshots on demand, agent harness API, hosted agent API (their own agent), secret proxy, secret proxy for any API, shared volumes

Unknown: everything else. Evidence (source + quote) per feature: https://battleships.dev/data/providers/azure-pipelines.json → feature_evidence

## Caveats

- Flat $40 per parallel job per month regardless of minutes; the engine sizes the pool by peak concurrency.
- Free grant (1 hosted job, 1,800 min/month) not encoded.
- Hosted Linux agents are fixed 2 vCPU / 7 GB; workloads needing more cannot be priced here (self-hosted/scale-set agents: $15 per self-hosted parallel job + your own VMs).
- Windows/macOS hosted agents use the same parallel-job price but modes are Linux-only here.

## How this provider charges


CI runner product (job-scoped, ephemeral). Added by the missing-providers audit.

| Regime | When it applies | How billed | Numbers | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft-hosted parallel job | paid parallelism | flat per job per month | $40/job/month, unlimited minutes, 6 h job cap, 2 vCPU/7 GB agent | https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azure-devops-services/ |
| Self-hosted parallel job | own agents | flat per job per month | $15/job/month | https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azure-devops-services/ |
| Free grant | private projects | 1 hosted job | 1,800 min/month, 60-min jobs | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/hosted |

## Gotchas
- Only one hosted machine size (2 vCPU / 7 GB).
- Minutes are unlimited on paid jobs: cost scales with concurrency, not usage.

## Worked example
4 vCPU / 8 GiB does not fit the 2 vCPU / 7 GB agent. For 2 vCPU jobs at 50 concurrency: 50 x $40 = $2,000/month.

Sources: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azure-devops-services/, https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/hosted