Azure Cognitive Services SLA Credits & Refunds

Cognitive Services downtime that's billed against your Azure subscription is usually creditable, but the SLA fine print determines how much. This guide walks through the Cognitive Services availability commitment Microsoft publishes, the exclusions that quietly disqualify many claims, and what FinOps teams do to systematically recover credits across an Azure tenant.

What this guide covers

• The official Azure Cognitive Services uptime commitment and credit tiers
• Which incidents qualify (and which exclusions silently disqualify claims)
• How to file a Cognitive Services credit request inside the Azure claim window
• Why manual claim recovery typically leaves money on the table

Frequently asked questions about Azure Cognitive Services SLAs

What is the typical SLA uptime guarantee for Azure Cognitive Services?

Azure guarantees 99.9% uptime for paid tiers of Cognitive Services (now branded as Azure AI services), measured as successful API responses to valid requests. Free (F0) tiers carry no SLA. If Azure fails to meet this commitment during a billing cycle, you are eligible to receive a portion of your Cognitive Services spend back as a service credit.

How do I claim Azure Cognitive Services SLA credits after an outage?

Submit a billing support request through the Azure portal: Help + Support → New support request → Issue type: Billing → Problem type: Service credit request. Within two months of the billing period in question, provide the affected Subscription ID and Resource ID, the start and end timestamps of the impacted period, your evidence (Azure Monitor logs, Resource Health alerts, or independent monitoring), and your calculated Monthly Uptime Percentage for Cognitive Services. Microsoft validates against its internal incident records before issuing the credit to your billing account.

What exclusions apply to the Azure Cognitive Services SLA?

Crucially, 429 throttling responses for exceeding your provisioned transactions-per-second quota are not counted as downtime, and Free (F0) tier resources are entirely outside SLA coverage.

Why is it difficult to get refunds for Cognitive Services outages manually?

AI/ML SLAs are still maturing, and Cognitive Services carries some of the most nuanced terms in the cloud catalog. Rate limits, queue depths, and model availability all get measured differently, and the SLA often excludes throttling that the provider deems "expected." Teams that successfully claim Cognitive Services credits do so by capturing per-request latency and error-code data and matching it precisely against the published terms.

Related Azure SLA guides

Other Azure services creditable through the same portal-based billing request process:

• Azure Azure OpenAI SLA credits — AI/ML
• Azure Machine Learning SLA credits — AI/ML
• Azure Virtual Machines SLA credits — Compute
• Azure Blob Storage SLA credits — Storage

Recover Azure credits without a portal grind

Azure billing support requests for Cognitive Services aren't difficult to file — they're tedious. Each one takes the same kind of subscription-ID, resource-ID, timestamp, and uptime-calculation packaging, repeated for every incident across every subscription you own.

Next Signal detects Cognitive Services SLA breaches across your Azure tenants, packages the credit request in the format Microsoft expects, and submits it. See how it works or start a free trial.