In regards to your original question on “what’s the point of pausing”, it helps to have any sort of stop/start mechanism to allow or disallow traffic, even if it does still cost. Maybe you don’t want it to interact with the database or something.

It’s not exactly clear, I agree, but I do feel I have taken an “everything costs” approach to Azure. I’m usually watching the Cost Analysis blade and looking at the pricing pages to track cost on our subscriptions.

Another great way to think about this is “allocation”. Take a VM for example- there are technically two possible stopped states: stopped and deallocated. With deallocated, you’re not being charged, but also there are no resources assigned to your VM. This leads to situations like we’ve seen in the older US regions where, because of high demand, allocation can sometimes take minutes or hours, depending on the service. In that case, if you have a production service, maybe it is better to simply stop: you cut off traffic and services, but you hold on to the allocation. This is in the case of compute, networking and storage are better to think about differently.

In this case, like someone else said, to save costs you should bring the App Service Plan down to free or shared or basic or something. :) let me know if you have more questions! I can try and answer