Microsoft Azure grant for nonprofits ($2,000/yr, renews)
- Free allowance
- $2,000 (USD) in donated Azure services credits per year, renewable.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- per-object-capper-object-cap: Blob block blob max ~190.7 TiB
- Evidence
- reported3 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | $2,000 (USD) in donated Azure services credits per year, renewable. Not a byte quota — a credit grant usable against 'the complete portfolio of Azure products and cloud services', which includes Blob Storage / Data Lake Storage Gen2 / Azure Files. unit mixed; metered on stored-bytes |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
per-object-cap: Blob block blob max ~190.7 TiB, single PUT 5,000 MiB — not the constraint. The constraint is *budget*: the grant is a spend cap, and any per-GB/month rate times 10 TiB must fit inside $2,000/yr. request-rate: standard storage account limits (20,000 IOPS-class). retention: balance expires at the annual renewal date; 'Early consumption of the $2,000 balance does not trigger or permit early renewal'. |
| Binding | per-object-cap the per-object cap sets the shard size and therefore the object count; it bounds the total more tightly than any headline quota |
| Identity | card not published |
| Egress | Azure egress is metered and would eat the credit; this only works as *archive* (rare read) or behind a CDN whose own free tier covers delivery. Archive-tier reads also carry retrieval cost. |
| Per-object cap | per-object-cap: Blob block blob max ~190.7 TiB (209676867416883 bytes) |
| Retention | not stated |
| Interface | s3-compatible, rclone, cli s3 |
| Tooling | Native Azure API, not S3: rclone backend 'azureblob' (Tier 1, chunked, server-side copy), AzCopy, Azure CLI, BlobFuse for POSIX. Azure does not expose an S3-compatible endpoint on Blob Storage. |
| Composes with | Renews annually at $2,000 ('All Azure Sponsorships renew at $2,000 USD per year'), so it is a recurring grant, not a trial — but the balance is annual, so the multiplier is $2,000 x years x number of verified nonprofit tenants. Renewal must be done manually in the Nonprofit Hub between 30 days before and the expiry date, or usage converts to pay-as-you-go against the stored payment instrument. |
| Reliability | Missing the renewal window silently converts the subscription to pay-as-you-go and starts charging the payment instrument on file — a real cost hazard, not a data-loss hazard. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 3
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | www.microsoft.com/en-us/nonprofits/azure | 'Leverage $2,000 (USD) Azure services credits per year and access the complete portfolio of Azure products and cloud services' |
| 2026-10-21 | learn.microsoft.com/en-us/industry/nonprofit/microsoft-for-n | 'All Azure Sponsorships renew at $2,000 USD per year'; renewal window and pay-as-you-go conversion rule |
| 2026-10-21 | source not published | Do not treat any TB conversion as verified. |
Unknown values 4
$.identity_cost.detailboilerplate$.per_object_cap.notesthe field may be stated in a source that was not read$.retention.notesthe field may be stated in a source that was not read$.retention.statedthe field may be stated in a source that was not read