When your procurement team asks "who are we actually buying Claude from on Azure?", the answer is Anthropic. Claude models in Microsoft Foundry are third-party Azure Marketplace offerings from Anthropic — "Foundry Models from partners and community" in Microsoft's catalog language — and they require an Azure Marketplace subscription. Anthropic remains the seller and operator for both hosting options, and acts as an independent data processor for prompts and outputs. Microsoft provides the platform, the invoice, and the plumbing.
From tokens to invoice: the CCU meter
Usage is billed in Claude Consumption Units (CCU), a single Azure Marketplace billing dimension that replaced earlier per-model token meters. The mechanics:
- The CCU has a fixed price — $0.01 per CCU, so 100 CCU represents $1.00 of fees.
- Your token usage is converted to CCUs using Anthropic's published per-model token rates (Microsoft's docs defer to Anthropic's pricing rather than publishing dollar rates), after any contractual discounts.
- The meter is recorded hourly and invoiced monthly in arrears — strictly pay-as-you-go, with no prepaid CCU credits or balances.
- Deployments created before CCU billing became generally available stay on their previous per-model plan; new deployments bill in CCU automatically.
On the invoice this appears as marketplace consumption tied to your Foundry resource — a single CCU line per resource in Azure Cost Management, with per-model detail available in the Foundry portal's Monitoring tab rather than on the bill (see analyzing Foundry spending).
Prerequisites: not every subscription qualifies
Because this is a marketplace purchase, your subscription's billing method matters. Claude on Foundry requires a paid Azure subscription with a pay-as-you-go billing method plus Azure Marketplace access, and you accept Anthropic's marketplace terms during deployment. Free trial, student, and credit-only subscriptions are not supported, and Microsoft lists further exclusions including Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) subscriptions, sponsored subscriptions running only on Azure credits, and Enterprise Accounts in South Korea. Anthropic's Supported Regions Policy may additionally restrict availability based on your billing country or region. If a Claude deployment fails at the marketplace step, subscription type is the first thing to check.
How it relates to your EA or MCA
For organizations with a Microsoft enterprise relationship, two interactions matter:
MACC eligibility. The CCU meter is eligible for the Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) — the spend commitment negotiated in many Enterprise Agreements and Microsoft Customer Agreements. Claude spend through Foundry decrements that commitment like other qualifying Azure Marketplace consumption. Claude usage billed on other clouds does not. For an enterprise trying to burn down a MACC, this can tip the platform decision by itself.
Higher default rate limits. Enterprise and MCA-E subscriptions get substantially higher default throughput than plain pay-as-you-go — for example, 2,000 requests per minute and 2,000,000 input tokens per minute for Opus-family, Sonnet 5, and Fable 5 models, versus 40 RPM / 40,000 ITPM on standard pay-as-you-go. Your agreement type affects capacity, not just billing.
Negotiated pricing: private offers
List prices on the marketplace match Anthropic's published rates. Negotiated discounts are delivered as Azure Marketplace private offers, applied at the token-to-CCU conversion step, and can carry different rates per model. Practically, that means a discount never shows up as a separate credit line — you simply accrue fewer CCUs per token. Discount conversations for Foundry go through the marketplace/private-offer channel rather than through an Anthropic sales contract.
Where to go next
See Cost Management analysis for reading the CCU line, budget alerts for guarding it, and committed throughput vs. pay-as-you-go for the capacity side of the same conversation.