Azure's cost-management feature surface has grown substantially over 2024–26. Reservations, savings plans, spot pricing, scheduled-shutdown automation, budget alerts, tag-based cost analytics, anomaly detection. Most SMB tenants use a small fraction of what's available, and the unused features are usually the biggest payoff.
The pattern for AVD environments especially: a host pool sized for peak load runs at peak load 24/7 because no one configured auto-scale. A development subscription accumulates orphaned resources after a project wraps. Reservation discounts go unclaimed because no one ran the recommendations report. Budget alerts get set up at onboarding and never reviewed when the workload changes.
None of it requires expert knowledge to fix. It requires a monthly cadence: review the cost-management dashboard, action the recommendations, retire what's orphaned, claim what's claimable. An hour a month, often saves a four-figure invoice line per quarter.