Azure for Students Free Credit: How to Practise Safely in India

Azure for Students gives full-time students aged 18 and over USD 100 of Azure credit for one year, with no credit card, and you can renew it each year while you study. The credit goes much further than most students expect if you use free tiers, deploy only in your allowed regions, delete each lab when you finish and check usage every week.

At a glance (Microsoft's terms as of October 2026)

What you get, and the fine print

The Azure for Students offer is a real Azure subscription, not a demo. You can create virtual machines, databases, web apps, AI services and most other Azure resources, and every charge is deducted from your USD 100. You also get free amounts of popular services, which is where the credit stretches.

The offer terms add a few rules that matter in practice:

• Education use only. The subscription is for learning, teaching, non-commercial research and building or testing applications for those purposes. You cannot use it to host a paying client's website or to run outsourced development for others, so keep freelance work off it.
• No Marketplace spending. Credit cannot be used for Azure Marketplace offers, support plans, Azure DevOps or separately licensed products.
• No quota increases. Microsoft's service limits page states that free subscriptions, including Azure for Students, are not eligible for limit or quota increases. GPU-heavy machine learning is therefore not realistic on this offer.
• One per person. It is non-transferable and cannot be combined with other offers.

For the other Microsoft offers open to you, such as Microsoft Learn, Office 365 A1 and Microsoft Student Ambassadors, see our guide to Microsoft student programmes in India.

How to sign up from India

1. Sign in with a personal Microsoft account that you will keep after graduation.
2. Open the Azure for Students page, choose to start, and enter your college email when asked to verify student status.
3. After activation, open the Education Hub in the Azure portal. Its Overview page shows your monthly and total usage and the countdown to renewal.

Two errors Indian students meet first

"Your email domain is not currently registered." Microsoft's verification service does not recognise your college domain yet. Ask your college IT team or placement cell to check whether the domain is registered with Microsoft's academic verification. Another route is the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which verifies students separately and lists an Azure offer for verified students aged 18 and over.

"RequestDisallowedByAzure" when you deploy. Azure for Students subscriptions are limited to a set of regions. Open Azure Policy, look at the policy assignments on your subscription, read the allowed locations, and deploy only there. If Central India or South India is on your list, choose it for lower latency from India. Many tutorials use East US in their examples, which is why a copied command often fails on the first try.

Set guardrails before you build anything

Most surprise bills come from forgetting, not from expensive services. Spend ten minutes on these habits first.

1. Create a budget. Microsoft's Education Hub guide shows how to track usage and create budgets in Cost Management. A sensible student budget is your credit divided by twelve, roughly USD 8 a month, with alerts at 50% and 80%. Budgets send emails; they do not switch anything off. If the budget option is not available on your subscription, track spending in the Education Hub every week instead.
2. One resource group per lab. Put everything for one exercise in one resource group, then delete the whole group when you finish. Nothing is left behind.
3. Tag what must stay. Add a tag such as keep=yes to the few resources you want to keep running, so you can spot everything else at a glance.
4. Check the cost analysis every Sunday. Usage data can lag by a day or more, so a weekly look catches problems before the credit disappears.

In PowerShell with the Az module, the create and clean-up loop for a lab looks like this:

New-AzResourceGroup -Name "rg-lab-week1" -Location "centralindia"   # one group per lab, allowed region
Stop-AzVM -ResourceGroupName "rg-lab-week1" -Name "vm-ubuntu" -Force  # deallocates, compute charges stop
Remove-AzResourceGroup -Name "rg-lab-week1" -Force                  # deletes everything in the lab

What to build: projects that fit the free amounts

Microsoft's free services page lists monthly free amounts. Some are always free; others are free for 12 months for new customers. Always confirm in cost analysis that a resource shows zero cost before you rely on it.

A few notes from teaching these labs:

• Azure SQL Database free offer. Each subscription can have up to 10 free databases, each with 100,000 vCore seconds of compute, 32 GB of data and 32 GB of backup a month. Choose Auto-pause the database until next month as the behaviour when the free limit is reached. An open SQL Server Management Studio connection keeps the database awake and burns vCore seconds, so disconnect when you are done. Details are on Microsoft's free SQL Database page.
• Indian languages. Translator supports Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi, Odia and more, so a bilingual notice board or a college FAQ bot in your own language is a realistic, useful project.
• AZ-104 practice. Use the free VM sizes, practise networking and backup, then deallocate the VM the moment the lab ends.

The services that eat credit fastest

• Virtual machines shut down from inside the OS. Microsoft's VM billing states page is clear: a VM that is Stopped is still billed for compute. Only Stopped (deallocated) stops compute charges. Use the portal's Stop button or Stop-AzVM, not the shutdown command inside Linux or Windows.
• Disks and public IP addresses. These keep billing even when the VM is deallocated. Delete the resource group when the lab is over.
• Networking services that bill by the hour. Azure Bastion, VPN Gateway, Application Gateway and Azure Firewall charge for every hour they exist, whether or not traffic flows. Create them for a lab, test, and delete them the same day.
• Clusters and compute instances. AKS node pools, Azure Machine Learning compute instances and Databricks clusters run on VMs underneath. Use their stop or auto-termination settings where they exist, and delete them after use.
• Log ingestion. Sending verbose diagnostic logs to Log Analytics adds up quietly. Turn on only the logs you need.
• Microsoft Fabric capacity. A paid Fabric capacity bills while it runs. For Fabric practice, use the Fabric trial instead; see our guide to practising Microsoft Fabric without big bills.

When the credit or the year runs out

If you use up the USD 100 before 12 months, the subscription is disabled and your resources stop. Microsoft's Azure for Education FAQ gives you 90 days from the end of the free subscription to upgrade to pay-as-you-go. Be careful: if you upgrade, any paid resources that were disabled start again and begin charging your card. Delete what you no longer need before upgrading.

At the end of 12 months, you can renew by signing up for the offer again if you are still a student; Microsoft emails a reminder before your anniversary. You can check remaining credit in the Azure Sponsorships portal at any time.

After graduation, your options are the standard Azure free account or pay-as-you-go. Read the current terms for India on the Azure site before you add a card, and carry your clean-up habits with you, because pay-as-you-go has no spending cap.

How CertTulen Academy can help

CertTulen Academy runs live, MCT-led online classes with hands-on labs that you can repeat in your own Azure for Students subscription. Start with Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) if cloud is new to you, then move to Azure Administrator Associate (AZ-104), where the lab habits in this guide become exam skills. Our trainers show you how to build each lab and tear it down cleanly. See each course page for what is included, then contact us or WhatsApp +91 93618 83583 for a batch that suits your timetable.