One of the best parts of a Visual Studio Subscription is discovering benefits that can make your day-to-day development work easier and more cost effective. One benefit that deserves more attention is Azure Dev/Test pricing. In fact, it’s one of the most valuable benefits included with a Visual Studio Subscription.
If you’re building cloud applications, testing new ideas, or maintaining multiple development environments, cloud costs can sometimes influence how often you experiment or how closely your development environment matches production. Azure Dev/Test pricing helps remove that barrier by giving eligible Visual Studio subscribers access to discounted Azure pricing for non-production workloads.
Whether you’re an individual developer exploring a new idea or part of a team building complex cloud applications, this benefit gives you the flexibility to experiment, validate, and iterate without letting cloud costs slow you down.
Why developers should care
Developers thrive when they have the freedom to experiment.
Whether you’re evaluating a new architecture, validating performance, testing deployment pipelines, or exploring AI and cloud services, you shouldn’t have to second guess spinning up the resources you need. Azure Dev/Test pricing makes it easier to create, test, and tear down environments without worrying about unnecessary development costs.
Imagine your team is preparing a major feature release. Instead of sharing a single test environment or delaying validation because of cloud costs, developers can quickly provision a dedicated Azure environment, run performance and integration tests, gather feedback, and remove the resources when testing is complete. That faster feedback cycle helps teams identify issues earlier and move confidently toward production.
This flexibility helps teams iterate faster, shorten feedback loops, and support agile DevOps practices while keeping non-production environments cost effective.
Build and test with production-like Azure services
One of the biggest advantages of Azure Dev/Test pricing is that you’re working with the same Azure services you’ll use in production, rather than a limited sandbox environment.
That means you can:
- Test application performance and behavior in environments that closely resemble production.
- Create temporary environments for feature development, testing, and validation.
- Shut down idle resources when they’re no longer needed and avoid overprovisioning.
- Experiment with new Azure capabilities without unnecessary cost concerns.
- Support continuous integration and delivery workflows with realistic testing environments.
This is where the benefit really stands out. You’re not just reducing costs. You’re giving your team the flexibility to learn, experiment, and build with greater confidence before deploying to production.
It’s important to note that Azure Dev/Test pricing is designed specifically for development and testing workloads, not production environments. Using separate environments both helps organizations take advantage of Dev/Test pricing and supports sound engineering practices for more predictable deployments.
Choose the Dev/Test option that’s right for your organization
Visual Studio subscribers can take advantage of Azure Dev/Test pricing through three purchasing options, depending on how their organization purchases Azure.
Designed for organizations using an Enterprise Agreement (EA), this option provides centralized billing and comprehensive management capabilities for teams running multiple non-production environments.
Available for organizations using a Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA), Azure Plan for Dev/Test offers modern billing flexibility as customers transition from legacy purchasing agreements.
Ideal for individual developers and smaller teams with Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise Subscriptions who are not covered by an Enterprise Agreement, this option provides an easy way to access Dev/Test pricing while maintaining billing flexibility.
Start using Azure Dev/Test pricing today
If you’re a Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise subscriber, sign in to my.visualstudio.com to learn more about Azure Dev/Test pricing and choose the option that best fits your organization.
It’s an easy way to reduce development cost friction, accelerate your projects, and get even more value from your Visual Studio Subscription.