Developer Benefit Program: How to Get $25 Azure Credits Every Month

Visual Studio Dev essentials provide a lot of freebies for developers. This includes a 6 months PluralSight subscription as well as a $25/month Azure subscription. These are real value adds to any developer who wants to get their hands dirty with some serious learning. In this article we will see how to register for the free $25/month Azure subscription.

Microsoft calls this freebie subscription as Developer benefit Program .In order to reap these benefits you need to have a Hotmail or outlook account. Now let’s see how to get the free azure credits using the developer benefit program.

Steps to activate Free Azure Subscription

After creating Hotmail/outlook account go to Visual Studio Essential Dev site.
Click on ‘Join now’.

This will navigate you to the page where you will be asked to furnish further details.
Click on Continue.
This will load the account information. Click on Use your benefits link.
There are multiple free resources which can be utilized for learning and R&D purposes. We will go with Azure $25 monthly Azure credit .Click on Activate.
Here you will have to Enter Personal details and verify yourself via Text Message/Phone Call. In addition to that you have to enter the credit card details. You won’t be charged anything. Once the subscription is set up successfully, there is an option called “Remove Spending Limit”, which when enabled allows you to use the resources when 25$ limit is reached. When spending limit has been removed credit card would be charged as per usage.

Click on ‘Sign up’.

The subscription has been created for you. You can add VMs and other resources to this subscription and get some serious work done.

Sign up

Make sure you check the usage once in a while from the Manage section of the Subscription.

This will show the remaining credits available. Make sure to stop the VM after usage, if needed, else the credit will be used up for every live minute.

Once the credit is used up for a particular month the VM or any other resources subscribed under the Developer Benefit Program won’t be accessible anymore. You will have to wait for the next month so that $25 credit will be added to your account. This will restore access to the environments. However if you don’t want to wait till next month you can click on Remove Spending Limit button in the above screen shot and you will be charged on a usage basis until free credits are loaded to your account in the subsequent month.