We are about to scale up our transaction volume significantly and need to performance test this before go live. Microsoft has eliminated the month-to-month option for a Tier 4 environment and only offers a 4 month option at $45K or an option to add the environment to license for $98,000. We do not need a test system scaled to production volume for an entire year. I imagine most customers don't. They need to test at scale for very brief instances. The rest of the time is just wasted cycles.

Microsoft needs to offer the option to deploy a Tier-4 environment in Azure which can be shutdown when not in use. Alternatively, they should provide the option to scale up the standard sandbox environment for this purpose. They apparently have the ability to scale up the production environments on the fly, so it should not be impossible to do the same in the sandbox.