Free hosting — Azure for Students (student-verified, NO card at signup)

runbook Mon Jun 22 2026 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) runbookhostingfree-tierazureazure-studentsstudent-accountno-card-on-file

Azure for Students — 2026-06-22

The user holds an active Azure for Students subscription (offer code MS-AZR-0170P). This is the rare cloud account that passes our no-card-on-file rule, because Microsoft verifies eligibility via institutional email instead of a credit card.

This file documents what's actually free, what's USEFUL for the oriz family, and what we'll use vs SKIP.

Eligibility + signup

Offer code: MS-AZR-0170P (full Azure for Students). A separate MS-AZR-0144P (Starter) exists for 13+/16+ users who don't qualify for the full offer; no credit, no time limit.
Who qualifies: 18+ verified full-time student at an accredited degree-granting institution. 140+ countries.
Credit card: NOT REQUIRED at signup. Verification is Microsoft's own institutional-email check (NOT SheerID). User confirmed empirically.
Email used: institutional academic email (.edu, .ac.in, .ac.uk, etc.). Document upload is the fallback if email auto-check fails.
Sign in with a personal Microsoft account, not the college work account (work accounts have org policies that block the offer).
Credit: $100 USD, valid 12 months. Globally USD-denominated.
Renewal: annual; Microsoft notifies up to 30 days before the anniversary. Fresh $100 + new 12 months as long as you re-verify as an active student. Unused credit does NOT carry forward.
At graduation: renewal blocked. No auto-conversion. Only path is manual PAYG upgrade (which then requires a card — DON'T).

What's included — specific quotas

Service	Quota	Type
App Service F1	Shared CPU, 60 CPU min/day, 1 GB RAM, 1 GB storage, 165 MB egress/day, 10 apps/region. No custom-domain SSL, no always-on, no scale-out.	Always free
Azure Functions (Consumption Y1)	1,000,000 executions/mo + 400,000 GB-seconds/mo per subscription	Always free
Cosmos DB Free Tier	1,000 RU/s + 25 GB per account, lifetime, opt-in at account creation, 1/subscription, provisioned-throughput only (not serverless)	Always free / lifetime
Static Web Apps Free	100 GB bandwidth/mo, 10 apps, 2 custom domains/app, free auto-renewing SSL, 250 MB storage/env, 3 preview envs	Always free
AKS Free tier	Control plane free (no SLA). VM nodes, disks, LB, egress all charged. One B2s ≈ $30/mo eats credit fast.	Control plane only
Blob Storage	5 GB LRS hot + 20k reads + 10k writes/mo	12-month free
Azure SQL Database free offer	100,000 vCore-seconds + 32 GB data + 32 GB backup per database/mo, up to 10 GP databases per subscription, auto-pause when exhausted	Always free / lifetime
Azure DevOps	5 Basic users, unlimited private Git repos, 1 MS-hosted parallel job (1,800 min/mo)	Always free
Container Apps Consumption	180k vCPU-seconds + 360k GiB-seconds + 2M requests/mo per subscription	Always free
Entra External ID (B2C successor)	50,000 MAU free	Always free
Egress	100 GB/mo outbound across account	Always free
Visual Studio Community + dev tools	VS Community, VS Code, SQL Server Dev, Windows Server, Visio, etc. (Software Download Benefits — no-commercial clause)	Bundled

Always-free vs 12-month-free split

Always-free (perpetual): App Service F1, Functions consumption grant, Static Web Apps Free, Container Apps grant, Cosmos DB free tier, Azure SQL free offer (10 DBs × 32 GB), AKS control plane, DevOps, Entra ID Free, 100 GB egress.

12-month / time-bombed: VMs (B1S 750h), Azure SQL standard 250 GB, Container Registry Standard, Load Balancer Standard, PostgreSQL/MySQL Flexible Server, AKS managed add-ons, blob storage 5 GB grant.

Card-free safety mechanism

Spending limit is ON by default and unremovable without PAYG upgrade. This is what makes the account safe under our no-card rule.
$100 exhausted: subscription enters read-only, then disabled. No card on file → no charges. EVER.
12 months expired: if still a student, renew. If not, 90-day grace period to upgrade (we won't) before resources are decommissioned.
Mid-period PAYG upgrade: remaining credit consumed first before any card charge — but we don't upgrade.

Commercial-use policy — strict on paper, loosely enforced

Official wording (program-faq):

"Azure for Students provides access to all Azure products expressly for the support of education or teaching, noncommercial research, or efforts to design, develop, test, and demonstrate software applications for these purposes."

Software Download Benefits clause (applies to bundled VS / SQL Server / Windows Server):

"You may not use Software Download Benefits to provide any services to others (such as hosting, web agency, integration or outsourced development, etc.)."

Enforcement reality:

Microsoft runs automated audits. Crypto-mining is the explicit #1 trigger.
Heavy policy locks restrict regions/SKUs/Azure OpenAI by default.
Hobby SaaS with low QPS that "looks like learning" tends to survive — but Microsoft reserves unilateral termination rights.
Not safe for monetised production reliance: no SLA, no migration window if flagged, 12-month credit cliff.

Family stance: Azure Student is for learning, prototyping, side-project demos, portfolio items, and dev-only stages. Anything that needs production reliability stays on Cloudflare Pages + Workers + Firebase Spark (our primary stack).

What we'll USE

Layer	Service	Why
Backup serverless rail	Azure Functions Consumption	1M execs + 400k GB-s/mo always-free. Useful as a 5th-rail fallback under the AWS Lambda exception chain for v0.1 prototype work. Not a production rail.
Prototype Postgres	Azure SQL free offer	10 DBs × 32 GB lifetime — more generous than Neon's 0.5 GB/project for any single DB. Useful for learning Azure SQL specifically.
Per-app NoSQL prototype	Cosmos DB free tier	1,000 RU/s + 25 GB lifetime. ONLY useful if we want to learn Cosmos; Firestore Spark covers production.
Side-project static demo	Static Web Apps Free	100 GB/mo, 2 custom domains. Useful for one-off Azure-integrated demos. Cloudflare Pages stays the primary host per `cloudflare-pages-only`.

What we'll SKIP

Service	Why skip
AKS	One B2s node ≈ $30/mo eats credit. Not free in practice.
VMs (B1S 750h/mo)	12-month only, then dies. No reason vs Render/Koyeb free.
PostgreSQL/MySQL Flexible Server	12-month only. Neon (Postgres) is lifetime no-card.
Blob Storage	12-month grant only. B2 + Storj are lifetime no-card.
Azure Front Door	$35/mo flat base fee even at zero traffic. Hard avoid.
App Service F1	165 MB egress/day is too tight to serve assets. Pages handles this.
VS Community / Software Download Benefits	No-commercial clause. We're commercial-use-OK only on Cloudflare/Firebase.

Cloudflare-Pages-only rule still wins

Per cloudflare-pages-only.md, every website and every app in the family hosts on Cloudflare Pages. No exceptions. Azure Static Web Apps is a learning/prototype playground, not a production destination.

Similarly, Azure Functions is a 5th-rail prototype fallback only. The serverless 4-rail chain (CF Workers → Deno Deploy → Render → AWS Lambda) is the production order.

Gotchas that burn $100 credit fast

Azure Front Door Standard = $35/mo flat base fee even at zero traffic. Hard avoid.
Public IPs ≈ $3-4/mo each — let managed services hide them.
AKS worker nodes: one B2s ≈ $30/mo. Use Container Apps if needed at all.
Cosmos DB free tier is one-per-subscription, NOT available for serverless accounts — opt in at account creation.
App Service F1 egress = 165 MB/day — never serve assets from it.
Functions Premium / Flex have no free grant — stay on classic Consumption.
Quota increases NOT available on Students — must PAYG to raise limits. So just don't try.

Recommendation for the family

Treat Azure Student as a side-pocket experiment account, not part of the production stack. Use it to:
- Learn Azure Functions / Cosmos / SQL for skill-building.
- Prototype an app that genuinely benefits from one Azure-native service.
- Spin up a one-off demo for a portfolio item that needs to say "Azure".
Production destination remains Cloudflare Pages + Workers + Firebase Spark.
Re-verify enrollment annually to keep the renewal flowing. Calendar reminder 30 days before anniversary.
Never enable any service that has a flat-fee base cost (Front Door, public IPs, paid SKUs).
If subscription is disabled (audit flag, $100 exhausted), do NOT upgrade to PAYG. Migrate the workload off Azure or write it off — no card goes on file.