Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test

Low dev/test rates help you stretch your budget farther

Each active Visual Studio subscriber on your team can use the Microsoft software included with their subscription on Azure Virtual Machines for dev/test at no extra charge—you’ll just pay the Linux rate for VMs you run, even VMs with SQL Server, SharePoint Server, or other software that is normally billed at a higher rate. Upload custom virtual machine images yourself or use one of our pre-configured images from the Azure Gallery.

In addition to the low dev/test rates on VMs, you also get low rates on Cloud Services, SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, HDInsight, App Service (Basic, Standard, Premium v2, Premium v3) and Logic Apps.

You can also enjoy additional savings with Reservations for one-year or three-year commitment on VMs, Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance.

Access to Windows 10 and Windows Virtual Desktop service

This offer allows you to run Windows 10 images on Azure for dev/test. You can also access the Windows Virtual Desktop service within your DevTest subscription to simplify the management experience of your Windows VMs and easily deploy and scale your development and test environments all while enjoying special discounts.

Additional Terms

You will be notified at least 30 days in advance of any increases to the rates.

As the account owner, you must maintain an active Visual Studio subscription to use this offer. Additionally, all others interacting with resources within the Azure subscription you create based on this offer must be active Visual Studio subscribers.

You will not facilitate, engage in, or participate in any use of Azure services, for crypto currency mining, denial of service attacks, spamming, or illegal activity, and/or any use that could cause harm to Microsoft or others, and will enforce strong internal controls to prevent the same. Microsoft may from time to time contact you regarding your use of your Azure services and you will upon such request provide reasonable documentation regarding your use. If Microsoft believes for any reason that such Azure services are being used for any prohibited purpose, Microsoft may, in its sole discretion, suspend or terminate your access to the Azure services.

Payment options

All you need is a phone number, a credit card or a debit card (non-prepaid), and a Microsoft account or a GitHub account. Only credit cards are accepted in Hong Kong and Brazil.

More details on pricing and billing can be found on the Azure pricing page.

Cancellation policy

You may cancel at any time. Payment is required for any outstanding fees incurred.

Offer availability

This offer is available to customers located in the following countries/regions and will be billed in the currency noted:

Limits, Quotas and Constraints

Please refer to this document for a list of common Microsoft Azure limits, quotas and constraints.

The following monthly usage quotas are applied. If you need more than these limits, please contact customer service at any time so that we can understand your needs and adjust these limits appropriately.

Service-level agreements

This benefit is exclusively for development and testing your applications. Usage within the subscription does not carry a financially-backed SLA, except for use of Azure DevOps and Visual Studio App Center.

Resource Commitment

All increases in usage levels of service resources (e.g. adding to the number of compute instances running, or increasing the amount of storage in use) are subject to the availability of these service resources. Any quota described in the Limits, Quotas and Constraints section is not a commitment that there will be sufficient resources available for you to reach the quota.

For any subscriptions of this offer that are not incurring charges and are inactive for more than 90 days, we reserve the right to remove any compute resources including hosted service(s), virtual machines and websites. Please note that no data would be deleted and customers can redeploy at any time. We will also provide advance notice prior to removing any compute resources.

You can also avoid having your compute resources removed by doing either of the following every 90 days:

1. Log into either the Azure portal or the new Microsoft Azure portal
2. Access your resources via our Azure APIs