# Azure Batch Account Idle > Explains why ZopNight reports no saving on idle Batch accounts, and how to find pool nodes that still bill. Source: https://zop.dev/integrations/azure/recommendations/azure-batch-account-idle --- ## Where Batch money is actually spent The [Batch overview](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/batch/batch-technical-overview) is explicit: there is no extra charge to use Batch, and you pay only for the underlying resources, such as virtual machines, storage and networking. The account is a free container for pools, jobs and tasks. The pools are where the bill comes from, because each compute node is a VM billed while it exists, whether or not a task is running on it. An account with no jobs is therefore harmless on its own. An account with no jobs and a pool still holding dedicated nodes is not. ## Finding pools that hold nodes with nothing to do ```bash az batch pool list --account-name mybatch \ --account-endpoint https://mybatch.eastus.batch.azure.com \ --query "[].{id:id, vmSize:vmSize, dedicated:currentDedicatedNodes, spot:currentLowPriorityNodes, autoscale:enableAutoScale}" \ -o table az monitor metrics list --resource \ --metric RunningNodeCount JobStartEvent TaskCompleteEvent --offset 30d --interval PT24H --aggregation Total ``` Nodes present every day while `JobStartEvent` and `TaskCompleteEvent` stay at zero is the pattern to act on. ## What ZopNight evaluates for a Batch account ZopNight collects the account's node, job start and task completion metrics over 30 days, but it does not turn them into a finding on the account. An account has no price of its own to recover, so any saving figure attached to it would be invented. Earlier logic that equated an idle account with its full cost was removed for exactly that reason. ## Why this page never shows a finding The honest answer to "what would deleting this idle account save?" is nothing. The saving, when there is one, belongs to the VMs in the pools. Those are evaluated by the VM-level checks such as Idle Azure VM and Idle Azure VM Scale Set, which price the compute that is actually billed. ## No saving on the account itself There is no dollar figure here. What you can save is the cost of the idle pool nodes, which the commands above let you see directly. ## Stopping idle pools from billing 1. Resize a fixed pool to zero between batches: `az batch pool resize --pool-id mypool --target-dedicated-nodes 0 --target-low-priority-nodes 0`. 2. Better, enable autoscale on the pool with a formula based on pending tasks, so nodes appear only when there is work (`az batch pool autoscale enable`). 3. Use Spot nodes for interruptible tasks to cut the rate on the nodes you do run. 4. Delete pools and, if nothing uses it, the account once the workload has moved elsewhere.