Azure Functions Timer Trigger
Run Azure Functions on a schedule using timer triggers.
- Card required
- Yes
Azure Functions Timer Trigger scores 5.9/10 for free value in Schedulers. The main constraint: Azure consumption, free grants, and billing terms depend on the account and current plan.
Free value score
5.9 / 10Show the math
Key metrics
What you get
Timer trigger for Azure Functions
Cloud-native schedule execution
Works with Azure bindings and services
Gotchas
- 1M executions/month free
Consumption plan includes 1 million function executions per month at no charge, resetting monthly across all function apps in the subscription.
- 400,000 GB-s compute free
Consumption plan includes 400,000 GB-seconds of resource consumption per month per subscription at no charge.
- Paid Azure subscription required
The monthly free grants apply only to paid consumption subscriptions — a credit card must be on file and an active Azure subscription set up.
- Cold starts on Consumption plan
Consumption plan instances scale to zero when idle and cold-start on the next timer trigger, adding latency; eliminating cold starts requires the paid Premium plan.
- No VNET or enhanced perf on free tier
VNET integration, guaranteed warm instances, and enhanced performance are only available on the paid Premium plan; the free Consumption plan has none of these.
- Storage account billed separately
A storage account is created by default with every Functions app and is not included in the free grant — standard Azure storage and networking rates apply on top.
- Shared, burstable compute only
Consumption plan runs on shared infrastructure with no dedicated resources; execution time is capped at 5 minutes by default (configurable up to 10 minutes).
- No SLA on Consumption free tier
Consumption plan has no financially backed SLA in the free grant tier; Premium plan provides 99.95% SLA.
Sources
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"Consumption plan pricing includes a monthly free grant of 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-s of resource consumption per month per subscription in pay-as-you-go pricing across all function apps in that subscription."
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/functions/ -
"Free grants apply to paid, consumption subscriptions only."
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/functions/ -
"A storage account is created by default with each Functions app. The storage account is not included in the free grant. Standard storage rates and networking rates charged separately as applicable."
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/functions/ -
"Lambda is AWS's most popular serverless offering, used by 65% of AWS customers, and Cloud Run shows similar adoption on Google Cloud at 70%. On Azure, 56% of [customers use Azure Functions]"
https://www.datadoghq.com/state-of-containers-and-serverless/
