I signed up for a 30 day Azure trial 3 days ago. I have 2 vms. Today, I have 2 messages popping up in my Management Portal.
Your Free Trial expires in 25 day(s). Click here to upgrade now.
Based on your usage history ($21.52/day), you might use your remaining credit in about 3 days.
25 days left $67 credit remaining
I feel like I cut the "speed-up countdown" wire on a time bomb in an 80's movie.
I'd like to fully evaluate Azure and I'm just getting started. Clearly I missed something along the way that is preventing me from getting the full trial period.
Microsoft Support just gives me Azure's sales phone number.
Does someone know what I need to do to get a trial extension and stop the countdown from going too fast.
Thanks!
There isn't a way to extend the trial period. If you have disable the spending limit, you account would operate without any problem, but yet, you would start incurring cost.
These are the ways you cut down costs
Reduce the size of isntance - say small ( A1 )
Recduce the instance count
At any point in time if you are not using your instance, you can stop the instance and you cost near ZERO cost during that time.
If you have MSDN Subscription or BizSpark Subscription would would get $150 everymonth as credits
I have noticed that costs can be quickly used if you keep dropping and creating the database for testing purposes on azure, best to use existing database
Related
I have a unique use case where I need to build in 14 extra days on top of a Stripe subscription plan but bill the client immediately. So if the plan is a 6 month plan, we really want to give the user 6 months and 14 days.
I originally thought I could leverage Stripe's trial feature for this, but found that the trial feature causes the billing to happen after the 14 days have passed which is not what we want.
I then tried to create plans by number of days (which is not really ideal but was worth a shot) but soon found that you cannot create a plan by days with more than 365 days (a year's plan with our model being 365+14).
I'm now thinking about creating one 14 day temp plan, subscribing a user to that, charging them and then after the 14 days, switching the user's plan over to a real 6 (or 12) month plan. This just feels overly complicated with a lot of overhead for wanting to simply add in extra days. I haven't seen anything anywhere in the docs that addresses this.
I should mention that I intend to use Laravel Cashier with this project and that I will also need to offer multiple plans per subscription.
UPDATE:
I just discovered that you can alter the billing cycle after a subscription has been billed using a trial. Which would mean that I should be able to create a customer subscription with multiple plans for say 6 months and then immediately after, create a 14 day trial on that subscription. If I go this route, it looks like I would need to set prorate to false and this might do the trick.
I still need to know if this will achieve the desired effect as well as work with both cashier and multiple plans.
I'm not sure why this got down-voted as it is a valid question given the limitations of Cashier along with the unconventional use case.
For anyone who might have more custom needs when using Stripe & Laravel Cashier and comes across this question:
I've since had time to explore this and found that Laravel Cashier cannot handle editing the subscription after the fact. There is no update feature there. Only the basic abilities to change/cancel plans. This didn't work for my needs.
What I ended up doing was using Cashier for creating Invoices as well as creating the subscription. Immediately after I am able to use the Stripe API directly to edit that subscription. By adding a trial_end with a date set 14 days after this subscription's current_period_end I can force the billing date of the next invoice to where I need it to be.
So for example, when a user subscribes to a 1 year plan, my update code would look like the following:
$current = Carbon::now();
$BillCycleDate = $current->addDays(379)->timestamp;
$edit_subscription = \Stripe\Subscription::retrieve($subscription->stripe_id);
$edit_subscription->trial_end = $BillCycleDate;
$edit_subscription->prorate = false;
$edit_subscription->save();
Also, I'm not sure if its a bug in the Stripe API, but simply specifying a trial_end date 14 days out on a subscription update causes the invoice to be rebilled right after that trial end date - despite the plan's interval being a year.
Just a quick question about the windows azure trial.
If i get the windows azure 90 day trial
will it show on my debit card?
could i be charged at all, i heard they put a spending limit on all trial accounts, however can you still be charged at all, even if you dont take the spending limit off?
the larger the vm you make (small to large for example) the shorter
it will run as it uses more compute hours?
thanks.
You should provide credit card, but won't be charged, so it won't show in statement.
If you excess you limit, they just will disable your account, but won't charge anyway.
Not sure about third question.
You will need to provide a credit card for verification purposes, but you won't be charged unless you explicitly switch to pay-as-you-go. And yes, the larger VM you created the quicker it will use up the free trial credit. The current trial gives you $200 or 30 days, whichever you hit first.
I apologize if this is in the correct StackExchange site. I couldn't find a place that seemed perfectly suited for this question. My question is as follows..
Being a Microsoft BizSpark member I have access to free Azure hosting. The hosting provided is 1,500 hours a month of small instances free (this equals out to 2 small instances running 24 hours a day for a full month). The details of the offer go on to state "You can run 2 Small instances full-time or other sizes at their equivalent ratios."
Does this mean I can run one Medium instance for 24 hours a day for a month, for free? If you look at the pricing, a Medium instance is exactly twice as much as a small.
Does anyone have any experience with this that can chime in? Many thanks in advance!
Yes, I know, I use BizSpark subscription and I have advised and follwoing couple of fellow ISV to use it. And yes, you are correct, the BizSpark gives you 1500 small instance hours, which is 1 full month of single Mednium sized instance. This is in terms of compute. But you know that if you run only one instance, you are not covered by the 99.95% SLA! The SLA only takes place when you have 2 or more instances per role!
There is a new trial offer available for windows Azure which gives you 25 hours of small computing instance time a month and other things like 1 GB SQL Azure and more. See link below: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/popup/popup.aspx?lang=en&locale=en-US&offer=MS-AZR-0001P
Now my question: Is there a way to prevent exceeding these limits? I only want to try and don't want to be billed.
I believe you don't need a credit card to use the 30 day pass - the one from here:
http://windowsazurepass.com/
as far as I know there is no automated way to have it turn it off before you get billed. You will need to just be very careful about monitoring your usage manually.
For Doobi's suggestion, I believe you need a promo code to get the free 30 day trial. There is a MSDN blog post with the code MPR001 here.
I've developed a simple system using ASP.NET MVC and WCF for customers to register software and get a license key. I was thinking about using Windows Azure instead of a traditional web hosting because it seems easy to use. I'd only need one SQL database and one small VM, but I'm confused about the billing.
Does the billing only charge as people actually use it, or would I pay the fee for each CPU every hour of everyday for the whole month because that was what was available to users? So for one single cpu VM at $0.12 an hour in a 30 day month I'd pay $86.4? Or would I pay less if no one used it? Then another $9.99 for an up to 1GB database, so for my needs I'd basically pay $96.39 a month?
That seems expensive for basic web hosting, but if it's easier for someone with little hosting experience to set up and maintain as well as making it easy to expand if I suddenly got a lot of traffic then it would certainly be worth it to me.
EDIT: I think I found the answer here: Getting started with Windows Azure
You're correct regarding the $0.12 / hour: you're billed based on resources consumed (meaning virtual machine instances), whether you're running at 0% cpu or 100% cpu.
While it might seem expensive compared to your average shared-hosting provider, consider that you're getting health monitoring, failover, SLA (if you have 2 or more instances) upgrade domains, etc.
I have two blog posts that go deeper into Compute Instance billing that you might find beneficial:
Part 1: The True Cost of Web and Worker Roles
Part 2: Staging and Compute-Hour Metering
I hope this helps...
The rule for billing is quite simple: if you look at the protal, there are the "gray" or "blue" boxes showing for a deployment.
If the box is gray, you are OK. If the box is blue, a bill is due.
This means that charges for every hour will be made whenever the box is blue, that is: once a deployment has been done, whether it's stopped or running.
Now you have a new feature in windows azure called WebSites. Deploying a website which have only a small amount of visits. It is simply 'free'. This is light weight website running in a shared environment.
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/ -> Check for websites.