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Comment by expertentipp | Hacker News Reader

If it only was easy to starting playing around with Azure. Only to activate the account they require proper, bank issued, credit or debit card. They explicitly refuse to accept prepaid cards even though they are VISA/MasterCard (BTW the same problem with Google Compute)... or am I doing something wrong?

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If you have either a MSDN subscription or sign your startup up for BizSpark, you can activate an Azure account without a credit card and use the credits they give you.

I've got friends who work for another cloud provider and they had major fraud problems until they instituted rules like these. Since cloud providers bill for usage at the end of the month, you can run up quite a bit of charges before the provider realizes that there isn't any money on the prepaid card and you might not be who you say you are.

My problem is not activation but rather that their free tier is too limited in terms of what services you can use.

Say I need an AD with two users, just to play with some stuff I can build for customers with "real" AD implementations? No can do, I'm supposed to pay full whack for AD like I actually needed it to manage a domain. Screw that. I should get a free tier with, say, up to five users or objects (just enough to get an object or two for each common type) or some call limit. As it is, I just let my trial expire and now I won't even think about building anything around AD unless absolutely forced.

I'm not sure what's missing from the free tier that you're looking for. It includes 500k objects. All I use is the free tier for testing against SSO, so maybe it doesn't cover your use case.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/active-dir...

You get

Since both AWS and azure some free tiers for a trial period, what other way do you see for them to ensure you aren't abusing the service and just creating a new account every month? Tying it to real financial accounts is unfortunately the easiest way to make that work.

Yeah, and MS is always after that sweet business 'moola, so they really want your boss's credit card. You get so many features out of the box with azure, and the free monthly credit to use them, it's no wonder they have to tie it down somehow even if it makes it an obstacle to a lone dev who just wants to try it out.

This is a problem with Amazon and Google as well, I won't give out my credit card details for an open ended arrangement, I really want to charge up my account when I'm ready.

I'm not sure if it's still this way, but I believe the default behavior is to just stop all your services when the the free trial amount has been reached before ever charging your credit card. You had to remove the spending limit for it to actually charge you. At least that's how it was when I started working with Azure. Can people who have signed up recently confirm?

Spending Limit is a great feature that Azure has that I wish AWS had. They also had it turned on automatically for me as a MSDN subscriber with free credits.

Yes, it's still like that ;)

>They explicitly refuse to accept prepaid cards even though they are VISA/MasterCard (BTW the same problem with Google Compute)... or am I doing something wrong?

Prepaid cards can be purchased anonymously. If you were running a cloud provider, would you rent a server to somebody who was essentially untraceable?

I think you overestimate their commitment and responsibility. It's not a server but in case of e.g. EC2 only a virtual container. I don't even get a permanent IP but a rotating one which is already blacklisted by many websites and services. I'm talking about low end, not demanding setup. In such cases I still think that requiring credit card details is too much.

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