🪪 Creating an Azure Account: What You Get and What to Set Up First

What an Azure account really is, the ways to start, what the free offer does and does not do, and the first thirty minutes: sign-in security, a budget alert, and how to close it all down again

What an "Azure account" really is

People say "my Azure account", but three different things are hiding in that phrase, and most confusion in the first week comes from mixing them up:

1. An identity. A sign-in: a personal Microsoft account (Outlook, Hotmail, GitHub), or a work or school account. This is who you are.
2. A tenant. A Microsoft Entra ID directory (it used to be called Azure Active Directory): the list of users, groups and apps of one organization. Every Azure subscription trusts exactly one tenant for its sign-ins. When you sign up with a personal account, a tenant is created for you.
3. A subscription. The container where resources live and where the bill is sent. This is the thing that costs money. One tenant can have many subscriptions: a company usually has several (one for production, one for testing), and a person usually has one.

The rest of this page is mostly about the subscription: how you get one, who may use it, and how you keep its bill small. The other two tutorials in this series explain where things live (regions and zones) and what you can build (a map of the services).

Ways to get one

• Free account. Microsoft's own description (read on 6 October 2026): a $200 credit to use within 30 days, plus free monthly amounts of popular services for 12 months and 65+ always-free services for as long as you have the account. It is available only to new Azure customers, one per person. A phone number and a credit or debit card are needed for identity verification, to check that account holders are real people: a temporary $1 authorization may appear and is reversed. During the free period the card is not charged. When the 30 days end or the credit is used up, the services are disabled unless you choose to upgrade to pay-as-you-go. The 12-month free services only continue if you upgrade (Microsoft says you must move to pay-as-you-go within 30 days to keep receiving them), and anything over the free amounts is then billed to your card.
• Pay-as-you-go. No credit, no commitment, billed for what you use. This is where surprise bills come from, so the budget alert below matters.
• Azure for Students. Microsoft's page mentions free developer tools and a $100 credit with no credit card, with an academic email address.
• Through your employer. Many people use Azure through a company subscription. That subscription, its credit and its bill belong to the company, and its rules decide what you may do with it.

The old Microsoft Learn sandbox (a free temporary Azure subscription inside Learn modules) is no longer available: Microsoft's FAQ says that to complete the exercises you now need your own Azure subscription. If an older tutorial tells you to "activate the sandbox", that part is out of date.

Signing up (from the documentation)

1. Open azure.microsoft.com/free and choose Try Azure for free (or the pay-as-you-go link next to it).
2. Sign in with a Microsoft account, or create one. Use a personal account for personal learning.
3. Enter your country and your details, verify your phone by text or call, and add the card for identity verification.
4. Accept the agreement and choose Sign up.
5. Open portal.azure.com and look for your subscription under Subscriptions.

The first thirty minutes: do these before you create anything

1. Sign-in security

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA). New Entra tenants have security defaults switched on: they require users to register for MFA and require administrators to use it at every sign-in. For a personal tenant this is what you want: leave it on. Also add MFA to the Microsoft account itself (account.microsoft.com, then Security).
• Do not do daily work with your most powerful role. The account that created a new tenant is usually its Global Administrator: it can do anything to the directory. Microsoft's guidance is not to use that role for everyday tasks. In a company, the answer is a separate everyday user and emergency "break glass" accounts. For one person, at least do not share the login, and keep the recovery methods up to date.
• Never share one login. Everybody gets their own user. Shared accounts make it impossible to know who did what.

2. Roles: who may do what in the subscription

Azure uses role-based access control (RBAC). The three roles to know first:

• Owner: everything, including who else gets access. Can also cancel the subscription.
• Contributor: create and change resources, but cannot give access to others.
• Reader: look, but do not touch.

To give someone access: Subscriptions, your subscription, Access control (IAM), Add role assignment. Give the least role that does the job, and give it at the smallest scope that works (a resource group, not the whole subscription). The services map explains scopes.

3. A budget alert

A budget is a monthly amount you pick, with emails at the percentages you pick. From the documentation:

1. Portal, Subscriptions, your subscription, Budgets, Add. (For one project, open a resource group first and add the budget there.)
2. Name it, choose the reset period (monthly), and the amount: use an amount you would be unhappy to exceed, such as 5 or 10 in your own currency.
3. On the next screen add at least one alert condition: a percentage of the budget (you can add up to five) and an email address. Add a forecasted alert too: it warns you when spending is trending above the budget, before it happens.
4. Add azure-noreply@microsoft.com to your approved senders, or the emails will land in the junk folder.

Three honest limits, all from Microsoft's documentation:

• A budget alerts, it does not stop anything. Resources keep running, and spending continues. The alert is a smoke detector, not a sprinkler.
• It is not instant. Cost data typically shows up 8 to 24 hours late, and budgets are checked every 24 hours. A runaway resource can run for a day before the email.
• A new subscription cannot do it immediately. Microsoft says it can take up to 48 hours before you can use all the Cost Management features of a brand-new subscription. So on day one, the real protection is the free account's own rule (it disables instead of charging), and a habit: look at Cost analysis every few days.

Look around (from the documentation)

• Subscriptions shows what you have, its state (Active, Disabled) and your role.
• Cost Management + Billing, then Cost analysis, shows what has been spent and on which resources.
• Resource groups shows the folders your resources live in: the next tutorial after this one explains them.

The Azure CLI: the same thing from a terminal

Everything in the portal is also available from the Azure CLI (az), and from Cloud Shell, a terminal inside the portal with the CLI already installed and signed in. You can install the CLI on your own machine (Linux, macOS, Windows). The first commands, none of which change anything:

az login
az account show
az account list --output table
az account set --subscription "SUBSCRIPTION NAME OR ID"

• az login opens a browser to sign in. On a machine without a browser, az login --use-device-code shows a code to type in at another machine.
• az account show is the answer to "where am I?": the current subscription, its ID and the tenant.
• az account list lists the subscriptions you can use. By default it shows only the Enabled ones; add --all to see the rest.
• az account set chooses the subscription the next commands will use. If you have more than one, always check this first, so that a test does not land in the wrong subscription.
• Every command takes --output table, --output json and --query (to pick fields).

Closing it down

Free accounts disable themselves, but a pay-as-you-go subscription keeps billing for whatever exists. From the documentation, the order that works:

1. Back up what you want to keep. Then stop or, better, delete the resources. Deleting the resource group removes everything in it.
2. Portal, Cost Management + Billing, Subscriptions, choose the subscription, Cancel. Only the subscription owner can. Choose the reason, and choose Turn off resources if asked.
3. Billing stops immediately, but the portal can take up to 10 minutes to show it, and the final bill can arrive up to three days later (the billing period is closed within 72 hours).
4. After cancelling, the services are disabled: virtual machines are deallocated, temporary IP addresses are freed, and storage is read-only. Microsoft keeps the data for 30 to 90 days in case you change your mind, at no charge.
5. The Delete subscription button appears three days after cancelling. The subscription is deleted automatically 90 days after cancelling. You can only delete it when all resources are gone: hidden resource types can block it (portal: the subscription, Resources, Manage view, Show hidden types).
6. Azure never deletes your account by itself. The account (the Microsoft identity) stays: remove the card from it if you want it unusable, and delete the Microsoft account if it has no other use.

The most common mistakes

• Mixing up tenant and subscription: signing in with the right user but looking at the wrong subscription (or tenant). az account show and the portal's subscription filter tell you.
• Giving Owner to everybody, and sharing one login.
• No budget alert, or one that sends mail to a mailbox nobody reads.
• Believing a budget is a spending limit. It is not.
• Leaving things behind: a public IP address, a disk, a stopped but not deallocated virtual machine. See the "danger zones" list on the free Azure VM page.
• Using the company subscription for personal experiments.

The cheat sheet

• Account: identity (who you are), tenant (the directory), subscription (the bill). Sign-in: portal.azure.com. Free offer terms: azure.microsoft.com/free, one per new customer.
• Security first: MFA on (security defaults), no shared logins, the smallest role at the smallest scope: Owner, Contributor, Reader (Subscriptions, Access control (IAM)).
• Budget: Subscriptions, Budgets, Add. Alerts only, 8 to 24 hours late, new subscriptions may wait up to 48 hours. Check Cost analysis yourself.
• CLI: az login, az account show, az account list --output table, az account set --subscription NAME.
• Close down: delete the resource group, then Cost Management + Billing, Subscriptions, Cancel. Delete after 3 days, auto-deleted after 90.

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