As organizations migrate from the Basic to the Standard tier of Azure Load Balancer (driven by Microsoft’s retirement of the Basic tier), they may unknowingly inherit cost structures they didn’t previously face. Specifically, each load balancing rule—both inbound and outbound—can contribute to ongoing charges. In applications that historically relied only on Basic load balancers, outbound rules may never have been configured, meaning their inclusion post-migration could be unnecessary.
This inefficiency tends to emerge in larger Azure estates where infrastructure-as-code or templated environments create load balancers in bulk, often replicating rules without review. Over time, dozens or hundreds of unused or outdated rules can accumulate, inflating network costs with no operational benefit.
Standard Load Balancers are frequently provisioned for internal services, internet-facing applications, or testing environments. When a workload is decommissioned or moved, the load balancer may be left behind without any active backend pool or traffic — but continues to incur hourly charges for each frontend IP configuration.Because Azure does not automatically remove or alert on inactive load balancers, and because they may not show significant outbound traffic, these resources often persist unnoticed. In dynamic or multi-team environments, this can result in a growing number of unused Standard Load Balancers generating silent, recurring costs.
In dynamic environments — especially during autoscaling, testing, or infrastructure changes — it's common for load balancers to remain provisioned after their backend resources have been decommissioned. When this happens, the load balancer continues to incur hourly charges despite serving no functional purpose. These inactive resources often go unnoticed, particularly in dev/test environments or when deployment pipelines fail to include proper cleanup logic. Over time, the accumulation of unused load balancers contributes to unnecessary recurring costs with no operational benefit.
