Azure Table Storage - Use V1 To Save Money

August 2, 2025
Last modified 8/2/2025
azure table-storage dark-pattern

Just like in 2018, V1 storage accounts are the more economical way to use the service - for blobs, queues and NoSQL. But the Azure Portal no longer lets you. That's fine, we've got ways!

This is a follow-up to Azure Storage - Version Has a Cost written 10/15/2018. 

Version 1 of storage accounts is no longer supported in the Azure Portal. If you create a storage account resource from the portal you will get the v2 benefits and enhancements (don't ask me what they are), but you will also get the additional costs associated with v2. For reference, as of today, for a modest:

 

For a modest:

  • 10GB of storage
  • 100 * 10K Reads operations
  • 1000 * 10K Writes operations

Version 2 will cost $9.26. Version 1 will cost $.64.

I'll wait while you re-read that.

await Task.Delay(30_000);

That's right, $9 vs ¢64 (is that the cents symbol for USD?)

That's pretty nuts. You can still use the calculator to calculate your cost differences. But yeah.

So, if you don't need v2, you definitely rather have v1.

But how do you do it if it's not in the portal? Hacker Style: The Terminal.

For complete instructions, Create an Azure storage account - Azure Storage | Microsoft Learn will walk you through it. You'll need to use (and I quote) “PowerShell, the Azure CLI, Bicep, or Azure Templates.” 

Not too bad. But a little tricky on their part. Dark Pattern for sure.