Azure Dev/Test pricing is consumption pricing for subscriptions created on one of the three Dev/Test offers: Windows, SQL Server and BizTalk VMs at the Linux rate of the same size, lower rates for Azure SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, App Service, Logic Apps and HDInsight, every other service at its normal price, and only for active Visual Studio subscribers; beside it Microsoft gives new customers a free account with a starting credit and twelve months of free services, and every customer a list of always-free monthly quotas. On the bill the dropped Windows uplift makes the difference, because on every Windows VM it is most of the price above Linux; the credits and quotas, by contrast, are capped and expire.
Pricing dimensions
Dev/Test is not a service but an offer type of the subscription, which Microsoft tracks through the offer number (OfferId). The table lists the offers, the free account and the free services as mechanisms, with what each changes in prices and invoices.
| Mechanism | Who gets it | What it changes in prices and invoices | Where it is optional |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay-as-you-go Dev/Test (offer MS-AZR-0023P) | active Visual Studio subscribers with a standard subscription, not a monthly cloud subscription; every person working with the resources needs a subscription of their own | the Linux rate for VMs running Windows or SQL Server, low rates for Cloud Services, SQL Database, SQL Managed Instance, HDInsight, App Service (Basic, Standard, Premium v2 and v3) and Logic Apps; paid by credit card; monthly usage quotas; no financially backed SLA except Azure DevOps and App Center | a subscription per developer or team; development and testing only |
| Enterprise Dev/Test (offer MS-AZR-0148P) | EA customers; the enterprise administrator enables the option per account, the account owner creates the subscriptions; users are Visual Studio subscribers, end users may access for feedback and acceptance tests | the Dev/Test rate equals the Linux VM rate of the same size, lower rates for SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance, the Logic Apps enterprise connection at 50 percent, Visual Studio software on Windows Server VMs without an extra licence; everything else at EA rates; billed through the enrolment with no separate payment | reservations over one or three years are available for VMs, SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance |
| Azure plan for Dev/Test (offer MS-AZR-0148G) | MCA customers buying through a Microsoft sales representative; the plan is enabled with the billing profile, Visual Studio subscribers create the subscriptions | lower rates and access to Dev/Test images; invoiced within the billing profile | per the Dev/Test pricing page not available through the CSP partner channel |
| Monthly credit for Visual Studio subscribers (offers MS-AZR-0059P, 0060P, 0062P, 0063P) | individual subscribers on selected levels, as a personal sandbox | a monthly credit whose amount depends on the level; once it is used up, usage stops unless a payment method is on file; Dev/Test rates apply beyond it | the account used to sign in decides the Entra tenant; moved into an EA, the subscription becomes Enterprise Dev/Test and loses the credit |
| Free account (offer MS-AZR-0044P) | new customers | USD 200 of credit in the billing currency for 30 days, then a move to pay-as-you-go or deactivation; twelve months of limited quotas that survive the upgrade and then switch to pay-as-you-go rates | a billing account in the Microsoft Online Services Program with at most five subscriptions |
| Free services for twelve months | new customers only | monthly quotas that expire at month end: 750 hours each of B1s, B2pts v2 and B2ats v2, 750 hours of Flexible Server B1MS with 32 GB of storage and 32 GB of backup for PostgreSQL and for MySQL, 720 vCore-hours of SQL Managed Instance, one Standard container registry with 100 GB | not transferable; only the named tiers |
| Always-free quotas | every subscription | per month, among others, 1 million Functions executions, 10 App Service apps with 1 GB, 180,000 vCPU-seconds and 2 million requests in Container Apps, 100,000 vCore-seconds of SQL Database serverless with 32 GB, 1,000 RU/s with 25 GB in Cosmos DB, 1 million API Management calls; Cost Management and Advisor without a quota | only the named tiers; everything above them at list price |
| The dropped Windows uplift | all three Dev/Test offers | the Windows VM costs the Linux rate; what a Windows licence otherwise adds is in licences in the cloud | Dev/Test subscriptions only |
| Purchase options | Enterprise Dev/Test | reservations on VMs, SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance | Azure reservations |
Invoices, exports and APIs
Invoices. A pay-as-you-go Dev/Test subscription gets an invoice of its own, like any pay-as-you-go subscription, with a billing period starting on the sign-up day. Enterprise Dev/Test appears on the enrolment's EA invoice and draws on the Azure Prepayment, the Azure plan for Dev/Test on the invoice of the MCA billing profile; the account types are described under Azure billing accounts. On the credit offers an invoice arises only for usage beyond the credit, on the free account only after the upgrade.
Exports. The cost export carries the offer in OfferId, the FOCUS export in x_SkuOfferId: MS-AZR-0148P for Enterprise Dev/Test, MS-AZR-0023P for pay-as-you-go Dev/Test, MS-AZR-0148G for the Azure plan for Dev/Test, MS-AZR-0044P for the free account and the Visual Studio numbers for the credit subscriptions; all Dev/Test offers share the quota ID MSDNDevTest_2014-09-01. The meter names do not change: a Windows VM still sits under the Windows product, such as Virtual Machines Dsv5 Series Windows, only its EffectivePrice matches the Linux meter. Three traits of the credit offers are in Microsoft's data documentation: the historical data of these subscriptions contains neither credits nor payments and can differ from the invoice, Marketplace purchases are not available for MSDN and Visual Studio offers, and pay-as-you-go data takes up to 72 hours. The remaining free-service quota and its expiry date are shown in the subscription's grid in the portal, not in the export. How the export is built is under Azure cost exports.
APIs. The Retail Prices API lists the Dev/Test rates as their own priceType, DevTestConsumption, beside Consumption, with the same productName and armSkuName, so the Linux, Windows and Dev/Test prices of any size can be laid side by side. Budgets work on these subscriptions as on any other; for pay-as-you-go, MSDN and Visual Studio subscriptions the budget offers the "Billing month" reset period because their billing period does not follow the calendar month (Azure Advisor, budgets and cost alerts).
Levers
Configuration. Every environment that is not production belongs in a subscription on a Dev/Test offer: on an EA the enterprise administrator enables the option on the account, on an MCA the plan comes through Microsoft sales, on pay-as-you-go the subscriber creates the subscription. The condition stays the same: whoever uses the resources needs an active Visual Studio subscription, acceptance testers excepted, and production load is excluded. Small steady workloads often fit into the always-free quotas when they run on the named tiers; anything above costs list price, and a month's quota expires. The patterns for non-production spend are in the article on non-production cloud costs.
Purchase option. In Enterprise Dev/Test, VMs, SQL Database and SQL Managed Instance can be reserved on top of the already lower rate; whether that pays depends on how long the environment lives. The API shows the Dev/Test rate for Spot VMs too, so a Windows Spot VM in a Dev/Test subscription costs the Linux Spot price (spot and preemptible capacity). Development environments that stop at night and over the weekend save more through scheduling and auto-scaling than through any offer.
Architecture. One subscription per environment keeps the offer clean: production on the standard offer with an SLA, development and test on Dev/Test, and the allocation per environment follows from the subscription rather than from tags (cost per customer, feature and environment). Whoever moves Visual Studio credit subscriptions into an EA spends the credit first, because the conversion deletes it.
Where it goes wrong
- Production in a Dev/Test subscription. The offer is limited to development and testing and carries no financially backed SLA; an outage brings no claim, and the use breaks the offer terms.
- Users without a Visual Studio subscription. Pay-as-you-go Dev/Test requires one from every person working with the resources; Enterprise Dev/Test allows end users feedback and acceptance tests only.
- Credit used up, subscription stopped. Without a payment method on file the Visual Studio subscription stops once the monthly credit is exhausted; the deactivation looks like an outage.
- The move into an EA deletes the credit. A Visual Studio subscription becomes Enterprise Dev/Test when transferred and loses its credit; the same happens when the subscriber becomes an account owner.
- The free account expires. After 30 days or once the credit is spent, subscription and services are disabled until the upgrade; after the upgrade everything outside the free tiers is billed at pay-as-you-go rates.
- Quotas expire monthly. Unused quantities of a month do not carry over, and after twelve months the time-limited services continue at list prices.
- Export does not match the invoice. On credit offers the historical data lacks credits and payments; the invoice is the reference, as credits, refunds and corrections describes.
- Dev/Test expected through the partner. The pricing page lists the offer as unavailable through the CSP partner channel.
Example
Germany West Central, EUR list prices from the Azure Retail Prices API, read on 2026-10-21, for a Standard_D4s_v5: Linux EUR 0.2024 per hour, Windows EUR 0.3643 per hour, Windows in a Dev/Test subscription (priceType DevTestConsumption) EUR 0.2024 per hour, which is exactly the Linux rate; on Spot, Windows costs EUR 0.0673 and Dev/Test EUR 0.0374 per hour, again the Linux Spot price. The dropped uplift on this size is EUR 0.1619 per hour. For Azure SQL Database Microsoft's Dev/Test pricing page states a discount of up to 55 percent, for the Logic Apps enterprise connection 50 percent. The free account brings USD 200 of credit for 30 days; the twelve-month list holds 750 hours each of B1s, B2pts v2 and B2ats v2, 750 hours of Flexible Server B1MS with 32 GB of storage and 32 GB of backup for PostgreSQL and for MySQL, and 720 vCore-hours of SQL Managed Instance; always free per month are, among others, 1 million Functions executions, 100,000 vCore-seconds of SQL Database serverless, 1,000 RU/s with 25 GB in Cosmos DB and 1 million API Management calls. The figures show that the Windows uplift is the amount Dev/Test removes from every VM hour, and that the quotas cover small workloads entirely and large ones not at all.
Sources
Read on 2026-10-21. Microsoft Learn: What is Azure Dev/Test offer?, Creating Enterprise Azure Dev/Test subscriptions, Start using individual Azure Dev/Test credit, EA billing administration on the Azure portal, Get started with Microsoft Customer Agreement billing account, Avoid charges with your Azure free account, Understand Cost Management data, Understand usage details fields, Tutorial: Create and manage budgets. Azure: Azure Dev/Test pricing, Enterprise Dev/Test offer, Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test offer, Azure account and free services. Prices: Azure Retail Prices API, EUR, Germany West Central, Standard_D4s_v5 with Consumption and DevTestConsumption); the filters are documented in the Azure Retail Prices REST API.