Azure AI Content Safety / Prompt Shields: Pricing, Tiers and What's Actually Covered
Microsoft Azure native content-safety stack including Prompt Shields (jailbreak and user-prompt-attack detection), groundedness, protected material and harm-category filters. Prompt Shields is not priced as its own SKU: it is bundled into the per-record rate alongside the other text checks.
Pricing tiers
Verbatim from the Azure Prompt Shields pricing page on 2026-09-23. Quote-only tiers are surfaced as such, never with an inferred price.
| Tier | Price | Free allowance | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier, text | Free / 1K text records | 5,000 text records per month | Text analysis, Prompt Shields, protected material detection and groundedness detection all included |
| Free tier, image and multimodal | Free / image | 5,000 images per month | Same feature set on the free tier |
| Standard tier, text | $0.38 per 1K text records | - | One record is up to 1,000 Unicode code points; a 7,500-character input bills as 8 records. Prompt Shields, protected material and groundedness are bundled, not priced separately. |
| Standard tier, image and multimodal | $0.75 per 1K images | - | Image and multimodal moderation |
Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/cognitive-services/content-safety/ | Verified 2026-09-23
OWASP LLM Top 10 coverage
What Azure Prompt Shields defends against, as claimed on its product pages and security documentation. Coverage flags are binary: an item is listed only if the vendor names the attack class explicitly.
- LLM01 Prompt injection
- LLM02 Sensitive information disclosure
- LLM03 Supply chain
- LLM04 Data and model poisoning
- LLM05 Improper output handling
- LLM06 Excessive agency
- LLM07 System prompt leakage
- LLM08 Vector and embedding weaknesses
- LLM09 Misinformation
- LLM10 Unbounded consumption
Hidden costs
Beyond the line-item price, every runtime AI guardrail carries operating costs the vendor page does not surface. Plan for these in any board paper.
- Per-call latency overhead. Guardrail check sits in the request path; budget 50 to 300 ms extra per LLM call.
- False-positive remediation. Allocate engineering time to tune policies after every guardrail rule change.
- Logging and retention. Guardrail decisions need to land in your SIEM. See siemcostcalculator.com.
- On-call coverage. Treat AI security alerts like SOC alerts. See securityoperationscost.com.
What Azure Prompt Shields is best for
Microsoft Azure native content-safety stack including Prompt Shields (jailbreak and user-prompt-attack detection), groundedness, protected material and harm-category filters. Prompt Shields is not priced as its own SKU: it is bundled into the per-record rate alongside the other text checks.
Azure Prompt Shields pricing FAQ
Common questions about Azure AI Content Safety / Prompt Shields, answered from the verified figures above. Every answer restates a value from the pricing table, not an inferred one.
How much does Azure AI Content Safety / Prompt Shields cost?
Azure AI Content Safety / Prompt Shields offers Free tier of 5,000 text records a month, then $0.38 per 1K text records on Standard. Paid tiers, where they exist, are shown in the pricing-tier table above, verified 2026-09-23.
Does Azure AI Content Safety / Prompt Shields have a free tier?
Yes. Azure AI Content Safety / Prompt Shields has a "Free tier, text" tier at no charge, with a free allowance of 5,000 text records per month. See the pricing table above for the paid scopes.
Does Azure AI Content Safety / Prompt Shields defend against prompt injection?
Yes. Azure AI Content Safety / Prompt Shields explicitly names OWASP LLM01 prompt injection among the attack classes it covers.