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Billing rates and management

This article describes the rates for the different features and capabilities used in the healthcare agent service, which are charged to the pay-as-you-go meter. Healthcare agent service leverages "Actions" as the unit that measures agent usage. The total cost is calculated based on the sum of the Actions used by your organization. The number of Actions consumed by an agent depends on the design of the agent, how often customers interact with it, and the features they use.

Choosing the right healthcare agent service plan

Healthcare agent service provides multiple tiers and pricing models. Customers can select between a limited Free(F0) plan or the Agent Tier (C1)

Plan Azure
Free F0
Agent Tier C1 (PAYGO)
Legacy Standard Tier (deprecated) S1

Free (F0) Tier

The free tier is available for evaluation and development purposes. This is the recommended tier to start experimenting with healthcare agent service.

Agent (C1) Tier

Starting November 1, 2025, healthcare agent service adopts simplified, flexible pricing. Where every Action will be billed at $0.01, meaning customers only pay for what they use.

Feature Actions Consumed
Classic message (Non-GenAI) — Standard, rule-based, or template-driven answer 1
Customer source — Response grounded in resources provided by the customer (websites, documents) 2
Customer extension — Response leveraging OpenAPI, conversational services, or other integrations 2
Credible source — Response grounded in built-in healthcare intelligence (medical databases, guidelines, trusted third-party sources) 5
Triage session — Interactive clinical triage session guiding a user through questions and recommendations 18

This approach ensures customers only pay for what they use, whether answering a patient’s question, triaging symptoms, or retrieving information from a trusted medical source.

Important

Starting November 1, 2025:

  • Customers will no longer be able to create agents using the S1 tier.
  • All new (non free) agents will be created in the C1 (PAYGO) tier.
  • All existing public preview C1 agents will automatically move to the new C1 tier.

Legacy Standard (S1) Tier

Important

Starting November 1, 2025 The S1 tier is deprecated. Existing customers on S1 can still leverage the S1 tier, but no new instances will be able to be created.

The Standard tier allowed flexibility with a fixed monthly fee plus consumption-based billing. It did not support any Generative AI features.

Billing components:

  • $500 fixed monthly fee (including 10,000 messages and 1,000 MCUs)
  • $2.50 per 1,000 additional messages ($0.0025/message)
  • $0.18 per additional MCU

Update your healthcare agent service plan

Owners of a healthcare agent service resource can manage settings and change the billing plan in the Azure portal. There’s a quick link from the healthcare agent service management portal in the profile menu (top right corner, with your initials).

In the Azure portal, go to the Pricing Tier section to make changes.

For our current pricing visit healthcare agent service pricing page.

Next steps

Healthcare agent service Overview