How to use the complimentary Azure credits in a Microsoft 365 developer tenant — step by step
Last updated on February 3, 2025
If you are a developer like me, there’s a good chance that you have some kind of a Visual Studio subscription (previously known as the MSDN subscription). With that, you can get a certain amount of free Azure credits per month. Woohoo!
If you’ve ever needed to use Visual Studio IDE and/or Azure DevOps Services at work, your employer has probably assigned you a Visual Studio subscription. Either they’ve paid for it or they’ve got it through the Microsoft Partner Network.
Or perhaps you are an MVP or MCT? I am a Microsoft MVP which gives me access to a Visual Studio Enterprise license, which again gives me 150$ worth of credits per month. Azure MVPs have it even better: they get 1000$ worth of free monthly Azure credit to play around with. Nice!
When you go to my.visualstudio.com and browse the benefits that come with your subscription, you are encouraged to activate your Azure credit benefit. When you click on the button, what it does is set up a new tenant for your Microsoft account that is associated with your Visual Studio subscription. The credits are then usable by subscriptions created in that tenant. Now, if you are anything like me, you might have exclaimed “But I wanted to use them in my developer tenant that I got through the Microsoft 365 Developer Program because it also has 25 free E5 licenses!” at this point.
Ever since I started using Microsoft 365 developer tenants, I’ve wondered how to move the complimentary Azure credit to my developer tenant where all of my app development is happening. I heard it was possible, but I could never find a proper guide about it, and there never seemed to be a suitable time to dig into it any deeper than that. Instead, I always focused on being super careful about what app service plans I was using in my developer tenant (consumption or free), so the costs would stay in minimum.
It might have something to do with me being at work while the vast majority of my colleagues and customers are on a summer holiday that I finally got around to investigate this matter in greater detail. And I have good news! I did manage to make my Azure credits usable in my developer tenant, and I want you to be able to do the same. Here’s a thorough step-by-step guide for you; I hope you find it useful. 🙂
How to transfer Azure credits to a separate developer tenant
- Invite your Microsoft account as a guest to your developer tenant
- Set up a subscription using the Visual Studio benefit in the non-developer tenant
- Change the Azure subscription directory to the Microsoft 365 developer tenant
- Give the developer tenant administrator permissions to the subscription
- Ensure you can create resources to the new subscription
Invite your Microsoft account as a guest to your developer tenant
- On the Microsoft 365 developer tenant admin account, go to portal.azure.com.
- Click on Microsoft Entra ID in the left-hand navigation.
- Go to Users.
- Click on New user and Invite external user. Send an invitation to your Microsoft account that is connected to your Visual Studio subscription.
- On your Microsoft account, accept the guest invitation that was sent to your email inbox.
Set up a subscription using the Visual Studio benefit in the non-developer tenant
- On your Microsoft/Visual Studio subscription account, go to my.visualstudio.com/benefits.
- Click on the Activate button, and then…
- If you haven’t activated the benefit before, complete the wizard. This will automatically create a new subscription using the Azure benefit for you. After that, you’ll get directed to Azure portal.
- If you’ve already activated the Visual Studio benefit in the past, click on View existing subscriptions in Azure portal.
- On Azure Portal, navigate to the home page if you are not there already.
- Click on Subscriptions
- See if a subscription using the Visual Studio benefit is listed here. Modify the filters to see all subscriptions.
If you are unsure whether a subscription is using the Visual Studio benefit or not, click on it and wait a few seconds on the Overview blade. If the subscription is using the credits, a yellow banner should pop up and tell you that you have credits remaining.
If the Subscriptions list has no subscription using the Visual Studio benefit, check the top right corner to ensure that you are in the correct directory. You can click on the cogwheel icon next to it to change the directory if needed.
If you are in the right place, but still can’t see a subscription for some reason, you can create a new one by:
- Clicking on the Add button at top-left.
- In the “Select an offer” view, select your Visual Studio benefit.
Change the Azure subscription directory to the Microsoft 365 developer tenant
- While still on Azure Portal with your Microsoft account, click on the subscription that uses the Visual Studio benefit.
- At the top, click on Change directory.
- Select your developer tenant from the dropdown. If you can’t see the option, make sure you’ve invited your Microsoft account that is connected to the Visual Studio subscription as a guest to your developer tenant, and also accepted the invitation that was sent to your Microsoft account email (detailed steps covered in an earlier section).
- Click on Change.
Give the developer tenant administrator permissions to the subscription
If you’d like to be able to create and manage resources in the subscription that is using the Azure credits with the developer tenant administrator account, you need to give it permissions to the subscription.
- On the Microsoft/Visual Studio subscription account, go to portal.azure.com.
- Change the directory to the developer tenant via the menu at the top right corner.
- Go to Subscriptions.
- Click on the subscription that is using the Visual Studio benefit. Modify the filters to see all subscriptions.
- Go to the Access control (IAM) blade.
- Click Add role assignment.
- On the Privileged administrator roles tab, select Owner as the role. Then click on Next
- Click on Select members and select the developer tenant admin as the user. You need to write the developer tenant admin account name/email in full to the text field to be able to select it
- After selecting the role and the admin account, click on Add.
Ensure you can create resources to the new subscription
- On the developer tenant admin account, go to portal.azure.com
- Go to Subscriptions.
- Check if you can see the Visual Studio benefit subscription in the list. Modify the filters to see all subscriptions. If you still can’t see the subscription, relog/restarting your browser session and try again. When you are able to see the subscription in the list, and your role has been updated to Owner (sometimes there is a short delay) it means you can also create resources to it. If you get an authorization error when attempting to create resources, restart your browser session.
Afterword
It took me much longer than it should have to make my Azure credits usable in my developer tenant, but now it’s done! I hope you got around doing it much faster, thanks to this post. And if we ever need to set up new developer tenants in the future, we can always come back to this guide and follow the steps again. At least I won’t remember all of them off the top of my head months later, which is why I decided to write them down. 🙂
I hope you enjoyed reading this article and perhaps other content available on my blog as well! If you’d like to make sure you don’t miss out on anything new, feel free to subscribe to my blog via the button on the sidebar (or at the bottom for mobile) and/or follow me on LinkedIn.
Happy Azure developing, and until next time!
Laura
Can anyone confirm if this still works? I have been attempting this and get an error message saying “the subscription was not transfered, please contact support”.
Only difference is I’ve had to have a different GA on my company tenant attempt to move it than my account which registered the initial subscription.
FYI that there is a direct redemption URL – I don’t know if that’s new – that you can copy when you do the external invite. Go to that URL while logged into the VS Sub account and you’ll be able to select the correct domain.
This article is an absolutely life saver – makes me appreciate how little I actually know about these nuances!
Good to know; thanks for the tip and your kind words, Adam!
Laura
You are the best LAURA – subscribed to your channels
Thank you, Harry! <3
Laura
Hi Laura. Thank you very much. Before performing this I was wondering: I already have some resources inside my Azure MSDN sub. e.g. VM’s, Networking, Resource groups etc. Do they need and how do they need to be moved to the other M365 sub?
Regards,
Erwin
Hi Erwin,
Yes, the resources need to be moved to the subscription that has the free credits. You should be able to move them when the subs are linked to the same Entra ID. If moving them doesn’t work for some reason, then you can at least recreate them in the new sub.
Laura
For some reason I never received the invitation email. I ended up raising support ticket with MS. They mentioned E5 developer accounts are not supported to be used with Azure linked to MSDN VS subscription .
I had another 365 dev tenant with E3 licenses (Created few years back) and they helped me move to the E3 licenses.
Not sure why its working for you guys . But good for you 😀
This is incorrect. Invite emails are generally painful to work in a single go with dev tenants primarily to avoid spam. What you can do is take the invite redirect url while generating the invitation and open that url from your microsoft account and it should be good to go.
Hi Rohit,
That’s odd. Glad that you managed to get the licenses moved at least.
Laura
You are a life saver!
Glad to hear you found this article helful, Corey! <3
Laura
Small bit of feedback: When you want to assign a new owner to the subscription, give the “guest user” (he one with the subscription)”global reader rights in your DEV tenant. This allows the guest user (the one with the subscription) to select users from the DEV tenant to give assign RBAC to the subscription once it has been moved.
Thank you Matthew for the tip. That was the missing piece. Also I had to activate the role using PIM on the guest user (the one with the subscription) before assigning the new owner.
@Laura: Thank you for the article. It worked well. I believe this role assignment need to be updated in the article for completeness.
Thank you so much for the article, Laura. It was incredibly helpful.
You are most welcome, Henrik! 🙂
Laura
Thank you
You are most welcome, Luis!
Laura
Thanks for this write-up, super helpful.
One thing to add, when inviting the MS Account as guest, you need to give it a role of some sort. Otherwise, when you later search for the Dev Tenant’s admin account (even when using full email) it won’t be found because the guest doesn’t have access to search Entra. I assigned the guest Billing Administrator which fixed the problem, though possibly a lower rights role might be possible.
My man. You saved me
I am no man!
Laura
PS: LotR reference
Thank you so much for posting this!!! Massive help 🙂
Glad to hear, you are most welcome, Clayton!
Laura
Thank you Laura! really helped.
Great to hear!
Laura
Brilliant, thank you Laura!
You are most welcome! 🙂
Laura
Can you somehow transfer the e5 25 licenses you get aswell from vs pro license? Great post anyhow. I have been searching for ages myself without luck.
Hi Casper,
Glad to hear you got your Azure credits transferred! I don’t think you can move those E5 licenses between tenants.
Laura
Thank you. Great article. Clear info. MVP indeed!
Thanks! Glad to hear you found the post useful. 🙂
Laura
Thank you SO much for creating this thoughtful write-up. I am not at all an AAD/Entra admin, and the level of detail was perfect for me.
Excellent to hear! <3
Laura
This is a great post. Thanks for that! 🙂
I would guess you saved many people more than just a few hours of research.
I would like to add a minor detail: Inviting the User is not enough. The User needs the right to at least read AAD/Entra strucutre. Otherwise you cant select the Dev Admin User (…nothing found) when you want to take ownership.
And it seems that it doesnt take 1 hour, now Azure says it will take 10minutes.
Hey,
Thanks for the heads up! Nice to see that it is indeed faster today than three years ago when I originally wrote this post. I updated the note to reflect the change. 🙂
Laura
Thank you so much for the article! I stumbled on the section next to the last. But I told myself you must be right and read the instruction again and again. Finally I got it. My advice for people who could not make it work afer following this article is that you must do almost exactly what this article said and have the faith that it works.
Hey Karen,
And thanks for your kind comment! The user interface of Azure portal has gone through some considerable changes during the past three years and does no longer look exactly as it did when I originally wrote this post. I’ll try to find time to update the instructions and screenshots to make the instructions easier to follow again. 🙂
Laura
What a great post, you took all the guesswork out of the process and saved me a ton of time!
Hey Paul,
Happy to hear you got the credits moved to the correct tenant successfully! \o/
Laura
Just wanted to say, credit where credit is due. This post saved my bacon today. Thank you so much! I got it working as I wanted, but could not have done it without this gem of a post.
Thank you
Thank you for your kind words, Jonathan!
Laura
This is an excellent write up. You’re my hero! 🙂
Aww, thank you, Max! <3
Laura
Just followed the steps, and everything worked out perfectly!! Thank you so much!!
You’re welcome! 🙂
Laura
Thank you! I burned hours trying to figure this out myself and made embarrassingly little progress. My corporate Azure Credits are now operating on my development tenant. *sheds tear*
Heh, you are welcome; glad to hear you got it working. 🙂
Laura
Thank you for providing this guide! You saved me a lot of time there. Greetings from Germany
Glad to hear you found the post helpful, Tobias. 🙂
Laura
This works great! Thanks so much for sharing!
You are welcome. 🙂
Laura
I can not seem to get it to work.. The subscription is not popping up in my developer tenant.
I’m really thankfull for writing this down, it would have took a long time for me to figure this all out.
Now I can go on with my internship without making changes in the company environment.
Thanks for the information. I have a Visual studio subscription from work. When I did the above, it does not show up in my Azure tenant that I own. The reason I want this is because I want to do some tests with Intune and when i do it with work subscription it interferes with compnay Intune.
Thanks Laura. This is fantastic!
Thank you for documenting this! I wanted to ask, does this “trasnfer” the subscription between tenants, or just “share” the subscription? Purpose being i still have resources in the existing Azure tenant to retain, but wanted to “share” the subscription with my M365 tenant so both tenants can consume resources under the same subscription?
Hi Russell,
This transfers the subscription to the other tenant. A single subscription can’t be shared between multiple tenants.
Laura
Thank you for documenting this process!
You are brilliant! – thank you soo much for this. Really helped me out. Fantastic!
Thanks a lot Laura, Really useful information. Saved lot of time 🙂
Thank you so much, Laura, for documenting this. I’ve finally got my subscription up and running in my test tenant!
That’s excellent to hear, Bill! And you are most welcome. 🙂
Laura
Thank you for documenting these steps! Do you know if we can use the same Microsoft account for multiple tenants at the same time?
Does this credit just last for one month?
Hi Mark,
The Azure trial credit only lasts for one month, but if you get credits via some other source, such as the Visual Studio subscription, then it renews automatically every month.
Laura
Thanks Laura, worked perfectly!
Great to hear, Tim! 🙂
Thanks Laura, this saved me a lot of frustration! Been meaning to do this for a while and finally got it working with this.
Hi Noa,
Happy to hear! 🙂
Laura
HI Laura, I’m not sure, this will join all the visual studio subscription to be used by one resource for example or they continue being insolated subscriptions on the developer tenant. I need to share credits of all my tenant visual studio subscriptions to be used by same resources, E.g a VM, is this possible?
Hi Hubert,
Each Azure resource can only use a single Azure subscription.
Laura
Perfect! Just the information I’ve been looking for. Thank you for the thorough step by step guide.
Happy to help! 🙂
Made it!
Thank you very much, Laura 🙂
Yay! You are most welcome, Frank-Ove! 🙂
Laura
Thanks for this Laura, really helpful. I’ve been using a pay-as-you-go subscription recently whilst my other credits sat idle. I’ve now switched them across which will be a great help.
Excellent! It’s always great to hear when people get to take advantage of those free credits. Boom!
Shouldn’t it be straight as it https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/fundamentals/active-directory-how-subscriptions-associated-directory
Hi Ash,
Unfortunately no. If you read this blog post and compare it to the article you just linked, you’ll notice that the latter one only has the “Change directory” step. This blog post focuses on the particular scenario mentioned in the title and goes through all of the steps you need to take in much greater detail.
Laura