I signed up for the Azure trial program a while back, and I found the interface quite nice. About a week later I received a call from the Azure sales team asking if I would like to provision another MS SQL server -- I guess they looked into my billings. Anyways, I told the sales rep no thank you, and how I normally use linux machines for my startup. I asked if there were any promos for someone in my position, and the sales rep quoted me prices on developer network subscriptions, or something like that.

Conclusion: I don't think it's terrible, but their tactics aren't always clear. AND, I'm consistently getting a bill for $2/m and I have no idea why.

Look into the usage breakdown.

Seriously --- all the detail is right there. http://imgur.com/KXm8BHO

And if you click "Download usage details", you get a csv of daily per-service usage data.

I'm sorry I didn't specify. I know how to check my usage, but my "next bill estimate" is only 11 cents. My total ends up somewhere between $1-3.

Hmm - maybe download your csv data and see if it reveals anything? It could be some kind of rounding. There's also http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/understand-your-bi... which might hint at something.