If you’re anything like me you try to utilise free tiers or cheapest pricing for personal projects. After all there’s usually no monetry profit being made from a learning experience so the cheaper the better.

I took a look at the cheapest Virtual Machine I could deploy into Azure.

Azure Standard_B1ls

From what I can tell the Standard_B1ls is the cheapest machine in pretty much every region.

Machine: Standard_B1ls
OS: Linux (Ubuntu)
1 CPU
0.5GB RAM
No additional disks etc
0.004 (GBP)/hour

This machine gives you a reasonable amount of resources for the money. Enough to spin up some very basic containers or try out some Linux config.

Cheapest Regions to deploy are below coming in at £2.99 (GBP) per month (730 hours) or just 0.004 (GBP) per hour if you just want some quick cheap compute.

  • East US
  • East US 2
  • North Central US
  • West US 2
  • West US 3

If you’re looking to deploy a very basic VM for a personal project (or even a business) this is the way to go.

I’m looking at spinning up a Tailscale server in the near future which I will post about once complete, but this machine size will certainly be a contender.