Thanks for sharing your views @Sampath, I totally agree with you.

Forward Geocoding Pricing:

As you've mentioned that you are using the Gen2 (Maps & Location Insights) pricing tier. Gen2 does not include the free 5,000 monthly transactions all requests are billed from the first one.

The official pricing table still mentions a free quota, but it is specific to Gen1 (S0) pricing tier. So, your charge is correct, and the pricing table is not outdated, but the free tier is not applicable under Gen2 usage-based billing.

Small fluctuations (e.g., €3.90 vs €3.96) are due to currency rounding or real-time exchange rates, not pricing errors.

Cause of Unexpected Charges:

1. Power BI auto-refreshed your table 8 times, making repeated calls to the API.
2. Since each refresh re-queried all 284 addresses, this caused 2,300+ geocoding API calls unintentionally.

This results in a cost of about €3.91 per 1,000 requests, which aligns with the standard Gen2 rate without a free tier: So, your interpretation is correct: you are being billed without any free tier, most likely due to your pricing tier setup.

How transactions are counted - Understanding Azure Maps Transactions

Route Matrix Strategy:

You're also planning to compute distances between 284 origins × 17 destinations. Azure Maps Route Matrix is billed as:

(284 × 17) / 4 = 1,207 transactions

Hence, your optimization splitting into 17 separate API calls (one per destination) is valid and keeps billing the same but makes tracking and retrying easier making it a Smart Optimization Strategy.

Details on calculating matrices of route - Post Route Matrix

Here are some Recommendations to Avoid Extra Cost:

1. You can Disable Power BI auto-refresh for API-based tables.
2. Cache geocoded results in a separate table to prevent duplicate lookups.
3. Also Set Azure Budget alerts to stay within your monthly €150 credit (Visual Studio Enterprise).

Kindly refer - Manage Your Azure Maps Account's Pricing Tier