Microsoft Azure Free Account (Compute)
- Free allowance
- USD 200 of credit for 30 days plus 750 hours each of B1s, B2pts v2 and B2ats v2 burstable VMs for 12 months
- Verdict
- triala time-boxed or one-time trial, not a recurring allowance
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- cardcard required, phone required
- Binding limit
- retention-clampedVM hours are free for 12 months, then billed; the USD 200 credit lasts 30 days
- Evidence
- documented3 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-22checked 2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-22
| Free tier | USD 200 of credit for 30 days plus 750 hours each of B1s, B2pts v2 and B2ats v2 burstable VMs for 12 months unit hours; metered on wall-clock; the VM hours are 12 months for new customers; the credit is 30 days |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
a USD 1 authorisation hold is placed at signup and removed |
| Binding | retention-clamped the 12-month window ends the 750 hours, so the clock is the constraint |
| Identity | card a card and a phone number are required for identity verification, quoted |
| Egress | not part of the free-account terms read; standard egress applies past any allowance |
| Retention | 12 months for the VM hours; the USD 200 credit expires after 30 days (365 days) |
| Interface | ssh the Azure portal, CLI and ARM API; SSH keys set at VM creation |
| Tooling | az CLI, the ARM and Bicep templates, the SDKs |
| Composes with | 12 months of a burstable VM and then a pay-as-you-go bill |
| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
| Notes | Twelve months is longer than AWS's six and it is still a trial. The 65 or more always-free services on the same page are the durable ones, and the VM hours are not among them. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 3
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ | 750 hours each of B1s, B2pts v2 (Arm) and B2ats v2 (AMD) burstable VMs for 12 months |
| 2026-10-22 | azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ | a USD 200 credit usable for 30 days; a USD 1 temporary authorisation hold at signup |
| 2026-10-22 | azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/ | the phone number and card are used for identity verification to validate that account holders are real people |
More fields 7
{
"shape": null,
"billing_model": "allocated",
"session_cap": null,
"keep_rate": {
"value": 1.0,
"basis": "a running VM bills its hours against the 750",
"source": "https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/"
},
"persistent_storage": null,
"network_out": {
"allow_outbound": true,
"allow_inbound_listen": true,
"ports": "all through a network security group",
"static_ip": true,
"ipv6": true,
"per_session_bytes": null
},
"free_tier_kind": "one-time-credit"
}Unknown values 2
$.per_object_cap.statedthe field does not apply to this kind of offer$.reliability_notenothing of this kind was observed