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We Need a Capped Plan for MSDN Azure Benefits

Like many developers, I’d like to play more with Windows Azure.  Microsoft recently improved the MSDN Azure benefits – extending them to MSDN Professional subscribers.

The trouble is, the onus is on the subscriber to avoid hefty charges caused by exceeding the ‘free’ storage, compute hours, and bandwidth. Here’s the wording:

“For all usage that exceeds the free allocation above, customers will be charged at standard rates. To avoid charges customers should closely monitor their usage.”

For my part, I don’t intend to hand my credit card over to Microsoft for unpredictable, open-ended charges. Nor do I want to watch a meter day and night.

Instead, there should be a Capped Plan option to the MSDN Azure benefit with no credit card required. In this option, Microsoft simply pulls the Azure plug if my application somehow uses up its free allocation.

Developers need reassurance that learning, experimenting, or doing something stupid on Azure won’t run up a bill that gets their credit card over-extended and even revoked.

Ken

5 Comments

  • Amen to this. Azure is pretty expensive so far, even with the MSDN break I am getting hit with about $85 a month in compute hour fees with two micro instances in prod and one for dev. It may not be much now but if my start up takes off (fingers crossed) I don't know if the hosting fees will out pace revenue. That's mostly why I won't be using any part of Azure except compute instances for hosting and SQLAzure. I can't risk locking in with other parts of the Azure infrastructure if the costs are going to eat me up, my app will always remain portable to an alternate VPS provider like GoGrid or Rackspace.

  • Completely agree. I was dinged for $17 because I went over allocation on a simple MVC test site that I put up just to test out the process of switching a project to Azure. Just $17, but still.

  • Yes! Exactly the reason I have not activated. Would love to learn and experiment but do not want to worry about a CC charge. So for now my clients will know nothing of Azure.

  • I don't understand how you guys are getting charged for basically sample apps. The quotas are quite generous so how are you using up all the CPU, Storage and Bandwidth?

  • Yep, me too. I don't want to put my credit card details in for learning to work with something. Capped is the way to go.

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