Happy Holidays, and happy almost new year from us at CloudZero!
November is always a busy time! In case you missed the headlines, here’s what happened last month in relation to cloud and AI costs:
- Microsoft’s enterprise pricing tiers are officially gone.
- AWS launched a Cost Efficiency metric that may help you optimize AWS costs over time.
- The launch of Claude Opus 4.5 brought with it a surprising cost update.
- Another outage — the most recent of many — brought down major services for several hours.
Get the details below!
Top Cloud Cost Headlines From November 2025
1. Microsoft eliminated its enterprise pricing tiers.
If you’re an Azure enterprise customer you may be used to the A–D tiers that set pricing based on the number of users. Unfortunately for companies in tiers B through D, those pricing divisions no longer exist and you’ll be paying A-level prices from now on.
We previously reported that this would be happening, but the change officially took effect November 1st. From now on, when you purchase new online services or renew your existing agreement, you’ll be subject to the new pricing scheme — so if it hasn’t hit your bill yet, it will soon.
Microsoft says this move is an effort to “standardize its pricing approach” and promote “greater transparency and alignment,” but in reality it means enterprises in what were formerly tiers B–D will likely see cost increases from 6 to 12%.
2. AWS launched a new cost optimization enhancement that could help you identify inefficiencies.
The AWS Cost Efficiency metric is now live on the Cost Optimization Hub. This metric is intended to help users keep track of cloud spend across different resources and discover areas that could be optimized.
According to AWS, the Cost Efficiency metric accomplishes two things:
- It “automatically calculates the percentage of your cloud spend that can be optimized by considering rightsizing, idle, and commitment recommendations…”
- It also “provides you with a measure of your cost efficiency by dividing aggregated estimated monthly savings of your cost optimization opportunities by your optimizable spend.”
AWS users should be able to use the insights to gradually improve their efficiency score over time.
It’s worth noting that CloudZero’s own Cloud Efficiency Rate gives you an even deeper picture into your spending efficiency, since it also takes into account your wasted spend, your revenue, and your cloud expenses from outside the AWS ecosystem.
3. Believe it or not, there’s been a price drop for AI inference.
We’re all so used to AI costs skyrocketing that a significant price drop for Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 model feels like pretty big news.
As of the end of November, Claude Opus input tokens now cost $5 per million and output tokens cost $25 per million. If you’ve been using Opus, you’ll notice this is a fairly steep drop from $15 per million and $75 per million for input and output, respectively.
Analysts are hopeful this means we’ve finally reached a point where inference costs are going down due to structural improvements in data centers rather than up due to high demand and structural constraints.
Our take is that even if Claude lowers the cost of tokens, the number of tokens needed per input and output is still climbing as inputs and outputs grow in complexity. At CloudZero we call this the AI false efficiency curve, and it’s becoming more and more common when using AI.
4. Hyperscaler outages are still happening with alarming frequency.
We reported last month on the AWS and Azure outages that brought down numerous enterprise and government systems. The pattern continues with a major Cloudflare outage that occurred on November 18th, bringing down huge services like X and ChatGPT for a few hours.
While outages like this don’t necessarily hit your cloud bills directly, they can and often do affect your bottom line. Even a few hours of downtime can severely cut into revenue. Plus, the need for redundant systems (and therefore, the need to budget for redundancy) is becoming increasingly clear the more these outages happen.
If you haven’t started allocating cash for backup systems, now is the time to take a closer look at your budget and find some wiggle room.
Don’t Let Unexpected Cost Fluctuations Derail Your Budget.
Your cloud bills should never give you sticker shock. With CloudZero, you can see (and optimize) your spending in real time, enabling you to shift course before unexpected costs snowball into a huge problem.
to see how you can avoid unpleasant cost surprises.
The Cloud Cost Playbook
The step-by-step guide to cost maturity
