Azure | Why am I charged on my Free Account?

As someone who has just started on Azure, and obviously are busy learning the ropes, you would start with the much prominently advertised "Free Account". You go to Azure.com, click on the shiny green "Start Free" button and you see that it says "Get started with 12 months of free services". So, this means that you could use Azure for a year for free. Right? But you might still have found yourself being charged for services or have heard/read customers being charged of a Free Account. So what's happening here?

Microsoft offers a 12 month Free Account per customer. This works in a tiered fashion as follows:

First month:

In the first month, you get a credit of 200 USD (or equivalent in supported local currency) which you could spend on any of the Azure first party services. In this month, the subscription has "spending limit" turned on, which is essentially a flag to make sure your credit card isn't charged without your consent.

• If you consume the credits before the end of the month, the Spending Limit would make sure that your subscription is suspended so that your credit card is not charged for any excess usage.
• If you reach to the end of the month, without entirely consuming the 200 USD, the spending limit would still make sure that the subscription is suspended and will not continue further. The only way to continue further is to remove the spending limit before the subscription has suspended.

Additionally, if you remove the spending limit before consuming the 200 USD, you still get the benefit of the remaining credits until you hit 200 USD. Post that, your credit card would be charged for usage.

The subsequent 11 months:

You would have successfully reached here, only if you've removed the spending limit and "upgraded" the subscription to Pay-As-You-Go. Hence, you've agreed to pay for services. From this point onwards, it would act as a Pay-As-You-Go subscription with a set of services free.

However, here's the juicy part:

You could still get services for free for 11 more months if you deploy services in tiers that exactly match with the ones given in this list.

For example, if you want to have a BLOB storage for free, you'll have to make sure that it's LRS-HOT and contains up to 5GB of data and has at most of 20,000 read and 10,000 write operations.

At any point in these 12 months, you would not be charged for services that fall into this list and would be for the ones that do not. 

Now you know exactly why some customers get charged despite having a Free Account. 

How to ensure that you deploy services in the right tiers to make sure that you do not get charged?

• One way of course is for you to manually refer to the above list to make sure you are deploying in the right tier, every time you deploy a service.
• A different way would be to use Azure Policies. Essentially you could write/assign policies to make sure that you deploy services only of certain tiers (SKUs) and the rest are denied. This specially comes in handy when you have multiple users accessing the subscription and want to enforce these rules on them as well. You could use the policies for each of the services listed here. 

Points to remember:

• The Free Account benefits are meant for customers who are new to Azure and are testing the waters. Use them accordingly. That is why it is the lowest tier in each of the services are given for free.
• The Free Account is one per customer, not per email address or credit card, etc.
• The 200 USD credits is only for the first month. Any remaining credits at the end of the first month will not carry over to the next month.
• The list of free services applies even to the first month i.e. those free services don't consume the initial free 200 USD credits as well.
• You would have to upgrade your subscription (remove spending limit) before it gets suspended. Or, you might have to contact Azure support.
• When you initially sign up for a Free Account, you would be asked for credit card information. There would be a tiny instant charge on the credit card to authorize it, but would be automatically refunded as well. This is not a charge for any usage.

Happy Azure time!