If you weren’t aware, Visual Studio subscribers have free monthly Azure credits, that are ideal for experimenting with and learning about Azure services. When you activate this benefit, it creates a separate Azure subscription with a monthly credit balance that renews each month while you remain an active Visual Studio subscriber. If the credits run out before the end of the month the subscription is suspended until more credits are available. No surprises, no cost, and no credit card required for any of it!
The table below shows you how many Azure credits you get based on your type of Visual Studio subscription:
| Visual Studio subscription type | Monthly Azure Credits | Activate Credits |
| Visual Studio Professional (standard subscription) | $50 | activate |
| Visual Studio Test Professional | $50 | activate |
| MSDN Platforms | $100 | activate |
| Visual Studio Enterprise (standard subscription) | $150 | activate |
| Visual Studio Enterprise (BizSpark) | $150 | activate |
| Visual Studio Enterprise (MPN) | $150 | activate |
Now that you know how many Azure Credits you get every month for free, you are probably wondering what you can spend it on! We have put together the following simple table to help you get going:
| Azure Service | Tier | Estimated Monthly Cost |
| App Service | Shared | $9.49 |
| Storage | General Purpose V2 (1GB) | $1.06 |
| SQL | Single DB (5DTUs, 2GB) | $4.90 |
| CosmosDB | 1GB | $23.61 |
| Functions | Dynamic | First 1M executions free (up to 400K GB-s) |
| Monitor | Application Insights | First 1GB free |
| Key Vault | Standard | $0.03 (per 10k operations) |
| Service Bus | Basic | $0.05 (per 1M operations) |
| Redis | Basic (C0: 250MB Cache) | $16.06 |
Hopefully, you found this information helpful and you are on your way to make use of your Azure credits. If you are interested in the cost of an Azure service you didn’t see in the table above, try the Azure price calculator. If you have any questions or problems just leave us a comment below.