How to Practice Azure for Free: 5 Ways With No Surprise Bills

Under almost every Azure video I post, someone asks a version of the same question:

"How do I get credits after the free trial runs out?"
"I've used up all my credits. Is there a free way to keep practising?"
"Can I build a real project without paying?"

They're good questions, and the honest answer is that every free Azure option has a catch. Most need a credit card. Most expire. And at least one of them can quietly turn into a real bill if you click the wrong button. This guide covers five ways to practise Azure without paying, what each one actually gives you, and the guardrails that stop a learning project from becoming an invoice.

If you only read one section, read the first one, because it's the option I'd pick myself.

Way 1: Hands-On Labs With the Subscription Provided

The cleanest way to practise Azure for free is to not use your own subscription at all.

That's how CloudLearn labs work. You pick a lab, and a real Azure environment is created for you. It isn't a simulation or a set of screenshots: it's an actual Azure subscription, signed in and ready. You follow guided steps, the lab checks your work as you go, and when you're done the environment is cleaned up for you.

That removes every problem the rest of this post deals with:

No Azure subscription of your own. You don't sign up with Microsoft or hand Azure a credit card.
No bill. You can't forget a VM overnight, because the environment doesn't outlive the lab.
No setup. The resource groups, permissions and starting resources are already in place, so you spend your time on the skill rather than the plumbing.
Feedback. The checks tell you whether you actually did it right, which a blank subscription never will.

CloudLearn has more than 100 Azure labs, and these four are free:

Free lab	Level	Time
Creating Your First Virtual Machine in Azure Cloud	Beginner	60 min
Deploy Your First Website to Azure with Static Web Apps	Beginner	90 min
Introduction to Azure Storage Queues	Beginner	30 min
Deploying Your First Microsoft Sentinel Workspace on Azure	Beginner	60 min

If you're brand new, start with the virtual machine lab. It covers the thing most beginners want to try first, and it's also the resource most likely to run up a bill in your own subscription, which is exactly why it's worth learning somewhere safe.

The rest of this post covers the options that use your own Azure subscription. They're all worth knowing about, especially for building your own projects later, but each comes with trade-offs.

Way 2: The Azure Free Account

The Azure free account is what most people mean by "free Azure". According to Microsoft's docs, it gives eligible new users:

$200 of credit, which you can spend on almost any service, for the first 30 days.
12 months of selected free services within monthly limits, such as certain small virtual machines for up to 750 hours a month.
Over 65 services that are always free within their limits.

You need a phone number and a credit or debit card to verify your identity. The card isn't charged as long as you stay on the free offer.

The important detail is what happens after 30 days. Your credit expires and the subscription is disabled. To keep using the 12 months of free services, you have to upgrade to pay-as-you-go. And that's the catch: the free account has a spending limit that stops you spending more than your credit, but upgrading to pay-as-you-go removes it. From that moment, anything you run outside the free limits is charged to your card.

Warning: Most surprise Azure bills start right here. Someone upgrades to keep the free services, forgets a resource that isn't covered, and finds a charge a month later. If you upgrade, set up the guardrails later in this post the same day.

There's a second, quieter limit too: free monthly amounts don't roll over. If you get 5 GB of storage a month and use 2 GB, you don't get 8 GB the next month.

Best for: a focused month of exploring, ideally with a clear list of what you want to try before the credit expires.

Pro tip: Spend your first 30 days on the things the free services don't cover, such as bigger VMs, networking appliances or AI services, since the credit pays for them. Practise the everyday basics in CloudLearn labs, so the credit isn't spent on things you could learn for nothing.

Way 3: Azure for Students

If you're a full-time student at an accredited college or university, Azure for Students is the best Azure offer there is:

$100 of credit, valid for 12 months.
No credit card required. You verify with your school email address.
Renewable every year while you're still a student.
Access to free tiers of popular services, plus developer software such as Windows Server and SQL Server through the Azure Education Hub.

There's also Azure for Students Starter for verified K-12 students, which offers free tiers of a handful of services, including App Service and Functions, with no credit at all.

Two limits to know. It isn't available for courses from for-profit training companies or MOOCs, and when the $100 runs out before the 12 months are up, you can't renew early. You either upgrade to pay-as-you-go or wait for your anniversary. So treat that $100 as the budget for the whole year, not the first week.

Best for: university and college students. If you qualify, take it.

Way 4: Visual Studio Subscription Credits

This one gets overlooked. If your employer gives you a Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscription, it usually includes a monthly Azure credit for development and testing. Plenty of developers and IT staff have this benefit and have never activated it.

It works like a smaller free account that refills every month:

The credit resets monthly. You can't carry unused credit over.
It has a spending limit on by default, so when you use up the month's credit, your resources are stopped until the next month rather than billed.
It's for dev/test only, not production, and Microsoft can suspend instances that run continuously for long periods.

Check my.visualstudio.com to see whether you have it, and activate the Azure benefit from there.

Warning: Don't remove the spending limit unless you mean to pay. Removing it turns the subscription into pay-as-you-go, and the charges go to whoever's card is on the account, which might be your employer's.

Best for: anyone whose job already includes a Visual Studio subscription.

Way 5: Always-Free Services on Any Subscription

Every Azure subscription, including a pay-as-you-go one, gets some services free within monthly limits. A few are generous enough to build real projects on:

Azure Cosmos DB free tier: the first 1,000 RU/s and 25 GB of storage free for the lifetime of the account, limited to one free-tier account per subscription. You have to opt in when you create the account.
Azure Static Web Apps has a free plan, which is plenty for a portfolio site or a small front end.
Azure Functions and App Service both have free allowances, suitable for small APIs and side projects.

The catch is that each service has its own limit, and going one step outside it, such as a bigger tier, an extra region or a feature the free tier doesn't include, is billed at normal prices. Check the current limits on Microsoft's free services page before you build on them, because they change.

Best for: small, long-running personal projects, once you know your way around Azure.

No Longer Available: Microsoft Learn Sandboxes

If you've seen older tutorials mention the Microsoft Learn sandbox, a free temporary subscription that appeared inside Learn exercises, it's gone. Microsoft's own FAQ says sandboxes are no longer available, and Learn exercises now expect you to bring your own Azure subscription.

That's a big part of why so many people now go looking for free practice options. If you're working through AZ-900 or AZ-104 exercises and the sandbox button isn't there, use a hands-on lab platform like CloudLearn or one of the subscription options above.

Guardrails Before You Deploy Anything

If you use your own subscription, set these up before you create your first resource. None of them take long.

1. One resource group per experiment

Put everything for one experiment in its own resource group, named after the experiment, such as rg-practice-vnet-lab. When you're finished, you delete the group and everything inside it goes with it. Nothing gets left behind in a forgotten corner.

2. A budget with email alerts

In the portal:

Search for Budgets and select Add.
Set the scope to your subscription, the reset period to Monthly, and an amount you're comfortable with, such as $10.
Add alerts at 50%, 80% and 100% of the budget, with your email address as the recipient.

Gotcha: A budget doesn't stop anything. It only sends emails. If you want resources to stop automatically when you hit the limit, you have to connect the budget to an action group and an automation that stops them, which is more setup than most learners need. Cost data also isn't real time, so alerts can arrive hours after the spending happened. Treat a budget alert as a smoke alarm, not a sprinkler.

3. Auto-shutdown on every VM

Set every practice VM to shut down at the end of the day, so a forgotten VM costs a few hours rather than a weekend:

az vm auto-shutdown \
  --resource-group rg-practice-vnet-lab \
  --name vm-practice-01 \
  --time 0200 \
  --email "you@example.com"

The time is in UTC, so 0200 is 7 PM Pacific in summer. The email warns you shortly before it shuts down.

The Five Things That Run Up a Bill

When learners do get a surprise bill, it's almost always one of these. Each comes with an Azure CLI command to find it. You can run them in Cloud Shell with nothing to install.

1. VMs that are stopped but not deallocated. Shutting a VM down from inside Windows or Linux stops it, but Azure still reserves the hardware and keeps charging for compute. You need Stop in the portal, or az vm deallocate:

# VMs that are stopped but still billed for compute
az vm list -d --query "[?powerState=='VM stopped'].{name:name, rg:resourceGroup}" -o table

az vm deallocate --resource-group rg-practice-vnet-lab --name vm-practice-01

2. Disks left behind after deleting a VM. Deleting a VM doesn't always delete its disks, and disks are billed whether anything uses them or not:

az resource list --resource-type Microsoft.Compute/disks \
  --query "[?managedBy==null].{name:name, rg:resourceGroup}" -o table

3. Public IP addresses nobody uses. Standard public IP addresses are billed even when they aren't attached to anything:

az network public-ip list \
  --query "[?ipConfiguration==null && natGateway==null].{name:name, rg:resourceGroup}" -o table

4. Gateways and firewalls. NAT gateways, VPN gateways and Azure Firewall are billed by the hour from the moment they exist, even with no traffic. They're common in networking tutorials and easy to forget:

az resource list \
  --query "[?type=='Microsoft.Network/natGateways' || type=='Microsoft.Network/virtualNetworkGateways' || type=='Microsoft.Network/azureFirewalls'].{name:name, type:type, rg:resourceGroup}" \
  -o table

5. Azure Bastion. Bastion is the safe way to connect to a VM without a public IP, which is why tutorials use it, but it's also billed hourly for as long as it exists. Delete it when you finish the lesson:

az resource list --resource-type Microsoft.Network/bastionHosts \
  --query "[].{name:name, rg:resourceGroup}" -o table

If you want to practise networking, gateways and Bastion without the hourly meter, those are exactly the kinds of resources a lab environment is built for. CloudLearn has labs on secure VM access with Azure Bastion and connecting networks with VNet peering, where the environment is removed when you're done.

A Cleanup Routine

At the end of every practice session, take two minutes to check what's still running:

# Everything you've created, grouped by resource group
az group list --query "[].name" -o tsv

# What's inside one group
az resource list --resource-group rg-practice-vnet-lab -o table

# Delete the whole experiment when you're finished
az group delete --name rg-practice-vnet-lab --yes --no-wait

--no-wait returns straight away while the deletion carries on in the background. Run az group list again a few minutes later to confirm it's gone.

Warning: az group delete deletes everything in the group, permanently. That's what you want for a practice group, and exactly why you should never put practice resources in the same group as anything you care about.

If you're new to the command line, Bash Scripting for Beginners covers enough to turn this into a script you run at the end of every session.

Which Option Should You Start With?

You are...	Start with	Then
Brand new to Azure	CloudLearn free labs	The Azure free account, once you know what you want to build
A full-time student	Azure for Students	CloudLearn labs for guided practice and exam prep
Employed, with a Visual Studio subscription	Your monthly Azure credit	CloudLearn labs for anything expensive, like networking
Studying for AZ-900 or AZ-104	CloudLearn labs, since Learn sandboxes are gone	The free account for your own end-to-end project
Building a personal project	Always-free services on a pay-as-you-go subscription, with a budget	Guardrails from this post, set up on day one

Whichever you choose, the hands-on part is what counts. I made that argument in How to learn Azure in 2027, and it's why I push practice over watching videos. Labs on their own aren't the whole story, though. In Cloud labs don't prepare you for real work I explain why your own project matters too. Use labs to learn the skills safely, then build something of your own to prove them.

Start Practising Today

You don't need a credit card or a budget to start. Open the free Creating Your First Virtual Machine in Azure Cloud lab, and you'll have a real VM running in a real Azure subscription in under an hour, with nothing to clean up and no bill at the end. When you're ready for more, the full lab catalog covers networking, security, Bicep, Terraform and more.