Azure pricing API gotchas: dedup meters, exclude Windows
Pricing real Azure VMs accurately via the public Retail Prices API while sizing a cheap homelab.
The Azure Retail Prices API (https://prices.azure.com/api/retail/prices) is public/no-auth and accepts OData $filter like armSkuName eq 'Standard_B2pls_v2' and priceType eq 'Consumption', but two gotchas waste iterations: (1) Linux ARM burstable SKUs are filed under productName Virtual Machines Bpsv2 Series while the Windows variant is ... Series Windows — there is no explicit Linux marker, so you must exclude Windows by negation rather than filter for Linux positively. (2) The same SKU+region pair can return multiple meterIds with different retailPrice values (legacy vs current meter), so dedupe by region taking the minimum to get the actually-billed price. Bonus: burstable pricing scales super-linearly — B2pls_v2 is ~$22/mo in West US 3 while B4pls_v2 is ~$77/mo (3.5x cost for 2x cores), undermining the casual 'just upsize later' mental model.
Knowing up front about productName-Windows-exclusion, the per-region meter dedup, and the super-linear burst pricing curve would save the three query-and-inspect iterations it took to land clean numbers.