Question about saving licensing and usage costs for Tier 2 F&O environments.

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Posted on by Jason Yeung

Hi,

My company currently has a number of "Dynamics 365 Operations Application Partner Sandbox" licenses, which are assigned to a user. I believe this would allow the user access to a Tier 2 F&O environment (implementation project) we deployed. We don't always need this project active (e.g. developers work on multiple projects on a given day). We're thinking of ways to potentially save costs and was wondering would the following help save costs?

- we "turn off the environment". What I meant by this is that for Tier 1 environments, we turn off the VM that is associated with the environment and turn it back on when it's needed (Tier 1 creates a VM in Azure). We thought there could be something similar with Tier 2 environments, but it's cloud based. If this could be done, how do we turn off the environment?

- we delete the environment and then recreate if needed.

Sincerely,

Jason

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Sohaib Cheema 49,679 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi,

You can save costs on Tier-1 by turning these off during off-work hours, such as overnight.

However, for Tier-2 through Tier-5, you pay a fixed monthly price. There is no option to shut these down. You can restart the AOS service but cannot shut down the entire system. These run 24/7, and I do not see any way to save costs on them.

Tier-2 through Tier-5 are provided in two ways:

1. A test system included with the purchase of D365 F&O (one free sandbox). You cannot save costs on this, as it is free and part of your SaaS purchase.
2. Additional add-ons that you can purchase. These add-ons are charged on a monthly basis (there is no per-minute or per-second pricing).

Have a look at next picture for an example: if you have paid for the full month, there is no opportunity to save costs during that month.

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André Arnaud de Cal... 304,678 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi Jason,

As mentioned by Sohaib, it is a subscription. You pay the amount regardless using the environment or not. It is always on. This is not only for the standard Tier-2 SKU, but also valid for the partner sandboxes.

When you have the partner sandbox, you also have access to Power Platform Admin Center. In case you have sufficient storage capacity, you can consider moving to PPAC deployed UDEs for development instead of the Tier-1 cloud hosted environment running in your own Azure subscription. It can reduce costs and like the Tier-2 ,the UDE is always on.

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Sagar121 1,190 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi,

You can reduce costs by turning off the VM from Azure for Tier 1 or enable auto‑shutdown from Azure.

With the Production environment, you automatically receive one complimentary Sandbox . If you have additional multi‑tier sandboxes, you can review them with your CSP partner or the licensing team and cancel any that are not needed. The number of sandboxes you keep depends on your requirements. Also, new sandboxes cannot be created on demand—you need an available slot, which is provided only when your licensing agreement for Sandbox.

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Jason Yeung 16 on at

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Hi all,

Thanks for the clarification and your help on this. I'll let the team know that we can't turn off Tier 2 environments like how it's done for Tier 1.

Sincerely,

Jason

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