Windows Azure “Introductory Special” — WTF?

WTF Microsoft? Seriously?

This is what you call an “introductory special”?

This is fine and all, except in the months of January and February — in fact, since I’ve signed up — I’ve never used the caching service.  Heck, I’ve barely used Azure!  How can I possibly be billed for $46?  Yeah, I’m pretty much cancelling my sub after this; can’t waste my time and energy every month double checking to see if I’m being ripped-off by Microsoft.  And on top of all that, I have to wait 4 hours for a support callback…

Now here is my theory: I am being billed $4/day just for having 128MB of cache allocated, whether I use it or not.  But this is beyond fucking stupid. It hurts adoption because it drives developers — like me — away from even signing up in the first place if I have to police by billing, even when I’m not using the service.  And seriously $46/mo. for having 128MB of web accessible memory available?  I get more memory allocated from my $7/mo. hosted shared server.  WTF?

I can accept the cost if there was some way to opt out or if there was some notice that I would be billed for being allocated the cache space or if there was some à la carte way to turn it off — my mistake for not noticing in those cases.   But I was not given an option to opt out of cache, I was not notified that I would be billed regardless of actual usage, and as far as I can tell, there is no way to turn off cache.

This is some serious bullshit.