Subscription management and billing
In this
section, we’ll look at the subscription types available and how to manage
access to your subscription, as well as how to check your current billing
balance.
Available
subscriptions
There are
several different kinds of subscriptions providing access to Azure services.
You must have a Microsoft account (created by you for personal use) or a work
or school account (issued by an administrator for business or academic use) to
access these subscriptions.
Let’s take
a look at the most common subscriptions:
Free
accounts The link to sign up for a free account is on the front page of
azure.com. This gives you a $200 credit over the course of 30 days to try out
any combination of resources in Azure. If you exceed your credit amount, your
account will be suspended. At
the
end of the trial, your services will be decommissioned and will no longer work.
You can upgrade this to a pay-as-you-go subscription at any time.
MSDN
subscriptions If you have an MSDN subscription, you get a specific amount
in Azure credit each month. For example, if you have a Visual Studio Enterprise
with MSDN subscription, you get $150 per month in Azure credit.
If you
exceed the credit amount, your service will be disabled until the next month
starts. You can turn off the spending limit and add a credit card to be used
for the additional costs. Some of these costs are discounted for MSDN accounts.
For example, you pay the Linux price for VMs running Windows Server, and there
is no additional charge for Microsoft Servers such as Microsoft SQL Server.
This makes MSDN accounts ideal for development and test scenarios.
For more
information and to see the available MSDN subscription tiers, check out
http://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/member-offers/msdn-benefits-details/. Note
that these subscriptions are to be used for development and testing, not for
production.
BizSpark
accounts The BizSpark program provides a lot of benefits to startups, not
the least of which is access to all of Microsoft’s software for development and
test environments for up to five MSDN accounts. In addition to these benefits,
you get $150 in Azure credit for each of those five MSDN accounts, and you pay
reduced rates for several of the Azure services, such as Windows Virtual
Machines.
For more information,
check out http://azure.microsoft.com/offers/ms-azr-0064p/.
Pay-as-you-go With
this subscription, you pay for what you use by attaching a credit card or debit
card to the account. If you are an organization, you can also be approved for
invoicing.
For more information,
check out http://azure.microsoft.com/offers/ms-azr-0003p/.
Enterprise
agreements With an enterprise agreement, you commit to using a certain
amount of services in Azure over the next year, and you pay that amount ahead
of time. The commitment that you make is consumed throughout the year. If you
exceed the
commitment amount, you can pay the overage in arrears. Depending on the amount
of the commitment, you get a discount on the services in Azure.
For more information, check out http://azure.microsoft.com/pricing/enterprise-agreement/