What does CIPP cost an MSP, self-hosted or hosted?
Ronan Behymer ·
Self-hosted CIPP costs nothing in licence fees, and CyberDrain's own documentation puts the Azure bill for a standard click-to-deploy install at about €25 a month. Hosted CIPP, where CyberDrain runs the instance for you, is €99 a month with no contract. Both figures were checked on 1 November 2026 against the CIPP FAQ and the CyberDrain pricing page. The gap is €74 a month, or €888 a year, and whether that's worth paying comes down to how much of your own time the Azure side eats and how much risk you're happy to carry on a tool that has admin rights over every client tenant.
What you pay for each option
The headline numbers are simple. The detail is in what each one leaves to you.
| Self-hosted CIPP | Hosted CIPP | |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Free (AGPL-3.0) | Included |
| Running cost | Your Azure bill, about €25 per month on CyberDrain's estimate | €99 per month, flat |
| Per-tenant charge | None | None |
| Contract | None | Month to month, cancel any time |
| Updates and maintenance | You | CyberDrain |
| Support | Community Discord | Quick-support Discord channel, weekly live training |
| Have I Been Pwned API key | Bring your own | Included |
CyberDrain lists everything the hosted plan adds in the FAQ: one hosted instance, automatic updates, the #CIPP-quicksupport channel, feature requests, weekly training sessions, early access to new Graph APIs, and that breach-detection API key. The same FAQ says hosted CIPP is "about 100% faster" than self-hosted because it runs on different infrastructure. I can't verify that claim either way, so treat it as the vendor's word.
The flat price is the part I like. Most multi-tenant Microsoft 365 consoles charge per tenant, so the bill grows every time you sign a client; CIPP doesn't, whether you host it yourself or not. Our CIPP listing has the full feature breakdown if you're still deciding whether it covers what you need.
Why the €25 self-hosted figure can drift
The €25 is an estimate for "the click-to-deploy configuration and average usage patterns", in CyberDrain's words. Another CyberDrain page, on why CIPP doesn't do demos, says self-hosting costs "roughly $0.10 per day", which is about $3 a month. Those two numbers are a long way apart, and I'd plan around the higher one.
Real bills can go well past either. In an r/msp thread from March 2025, one MSP with under 100 tenants said their Azure usage was about $60 a month before CIPP version 7 and over $100 after it, mostly from storage write operations and function execution time. They rebuilt the instance in a different Azure region, saw the daily cost drop from roughly $4.50 to $2, and then reported $100.71 for June 2025 and $185.31 for July 2025 when the problem came back. CIPP support had told them $100 a month was excessive. They planned to move to hosted.
That's one shop's experience, not a typical bill, but it lines up with CyberDrain's own warnings. The prerequisites page assumes you're comfortable with Azure Web Apps, Key Vault, Cost Management and Storage, and says plainly that getting deployment and maintenance wrong "can lead to ballooning costs". The troubleshooting page has a whole section on very high costs, which it puts down to durable functions looping after the function app is restarted mid-task (the fix is clearing the storage queues and blobs, then restarting).
If you self-host, set an Azure budget alert on the CIPP resource group on day one. It's a small job, and it's the difference between noticing a loop in a week and noticing it on the invoice.
Working out which one costs you less
Here's the sum I'd do. Hosted costs €99 a month. Self-hosted costs your Azure bill plus the time someone on your team spends on it: checking updates went through, reading the cost report, clearing a stuck queue, sitting in Discord waiting for an answer when something breaks.
At CyberDrain's €25 estimate the saving from self-hosting is €74 a month. If an hour of your senior engineer's time costs the business €74 or more (work it out from salary and overheads, not their billable rate), a single hour a month of babysitting wipes out the saving. If your Azure bill behaves like the one in that Reddit thread, hosted is cheaper before you count any time at all.
Self-hosting still makes sense in a few cases:
- you already run production workloads in Azure and someone on the team watches costs as part of their job
- you have Azure credits from a partner programme that cover the bill
- you want the code and data in your own subscription for compliance reasons
- you're a one-person shop testing CIPP on a handful of tenants before committing
For everyone else I'd pay the €99. It's less than many per-tenant tools charge for a few clients, and the hosted subscription also covers support for a self-hosted instance (it's on CyberDrain's list), so you can start self-hosted and buy the subscription later if you want help without moving.
What the paid alternatives charge
If CIPP is the free end of the market, this is roughly what the paid end looks like, from our Microsoft 365 and cloud management category as of 1 November 2026:
| Product | Published pricing |
|---|---|
| CIPP | Free self-hosted, or €99 per month flat hosted |
| Nerdio Manager for MSP | From $50 per tenant per month for Microsoft 365 management |
| inforcer | Quote only; 365 Manager is per tenant with a 20-tenant minimum on 12-month terms |
| Augmentt | Quote only, per seat or per tenant |
| CoreView | Quote only, four tiers |
| Octiga | Quote only, free trial |
Nerdio is the only one with a published number, and at $50 per tenant a 20-client MSP is looking at $1,000 a month for Microsoft 365 management alone. inforcer's 20-tenant minimum puts a floor under its price too, though we don't have the figure. None of this means the paid tools aren't worth it; Augmentt has shadow SaaS discovery, which CIPP doesn't, and inforcer adds a threat detection and response service with its own SOC. But if what you need is baselines, drift detection, licence and user admin across tenants, CIPP does that for a fraction of the money. You can compare them side by side on CIPP vs inforcer or Augmentt vs CIPP, or see the full list on the CIPP alternatives page.
If you only need a point-in-time security assessment and not ongoing management, CISA's ScubaGear is free and checks tenants against the SCuBA baselines from PowerShell.
Questions MSPs ask
Is CIPP free for MSPs?
Yes. The software is open source under AGPL-3.0 and there's no per-tenant or per-user licence fee. If you self-host, you pay Microsoft for the Azure resources it runs on, which CyberDrain estimates at about €25 a month for a standard install.
How much does hosted CIPP cost?
Hosted CIPP is €99 a month, checked on 1 November 2026. It's billed monthly with no long-term contract and you can cancel any time. The price is flat, so it doesn't change with the number of tenants you manage.
Why is my self-hosted CIPP Azure bill so high?
CyberDrain's troubleshooting guide says high costs usually come from durable functions looping after the function app was restarted during a task. Their fix is to delete the queues and blob data in the CIPP storage account and then restart the function app. Region choice affects performance too, so deploy to the Azure region closest to you.
Can I move from self-hosted CIPP to hosted later?
You can buy the hosted subscription at any point, and CyberDrain's FAQ says it includes support for self-hosted instances as well as hosted ones. CIPP doesn't offer live demos or trials of the hosted version, so most shops try it self-hosted first. Check the current setup guide with CyberDrain before you move a production instance.