[Answered] Does Azure Blob Storage Search Cost Extra?

Answer

Azure Blob Storage itself does not inherently include search functionality as part of its core service. However, if you need to search data stored in Azure Blob Storage, you would typically use other Azure services that provide search capabilities, such as Azure Cognitive Search.

Azure Cognitive Search

Azure Cognitive Search is a separate service that allows you to index and search data from various sources, including Azure Blob Storage. Using Azure Cognitive Search does indeed incur additional costs beyond the storage costs of Azure Blob Storage.

Indexing and Search Operations: When you use Azure Cognitive Search to index and search data from your blob storage, you are charged for the search service itself. This includes costs for indexing, querying, and other operations.
Additional Services: Some advanced features within Azure Cognitive Search, such as Image Extraction, Semantic Search, and Custom Entity Lookup, also incur extra costs.

Blob Storage Costs

The costs associated with Azure Blob Storage are primarily related to storage, data retrieval, and operations (such as read and write operations). These costs do not include search functionality:

Storage Costs: Based on the storage tier (Hot, Cool, Archive) and the volume of data stored.
Data Retrieval: Costs for retrieving data, which vary by storage tier. For example, data retrieval from the Archive tier incurs a cost per GB retrieved.
Operations: Costs for read and write operations, which are charged per 10,000 operations.

In summary, while Azure Blob Storage itself does not cost extra for search, using Azure Cognitive Search or other search services to search data stored in blob storage will incur additional costs.