How to Setup your Azure Subscription

How do I claim my Azure credits?

  1. Sign in to the nonprofit portal (https://nonprofit.microsoft.com) 
  2. Click on the “Azure credits” button in the middle 
  3. Follow the wizard to claim your credit  
  4. After you submit your claim, you will receive an email informing you that your account has been created How to add the sponsorship subscription to Azure account after claiming

The $3,500 USD Nonprofit credit is in the form of a special type of subscription called a “sponsorship”.  The way the sponsorship works is that your first $3,500 USD per year gets billed to us internally, and then if you exceed that threshold, the additional charges roll over to your credit card.

Unfortunately, that can make setting it up a bit confusing, since “Azure Credits” in the cost management portal refers to a totally separate thing, and when you try to add Azure Credits using the subscription menu, that refers to a third thing.

What you want to do is:

  1. Sign in to Azure using the same username you used to claim the credits from the nonprofit portal
  2. Go to “subscriptions” and click “add”
  3. In the list of subscription types that come up, the bottom option should be “Microsoft Azure Sponsorship”; select that
  4. While adding your sponsorship, you’ll be asked for your credit card info—this is required, and again, it’s just so that if you exceed the threshold, the additional charges have somewhere to go

Once that’s done, you can start using Azure—any consumption-billed resources you create on the sponsorship subscription will be billed to it.

To keep track of your remaining credits, use the sponsorships portal at https://www.microsoftazuresponsorships.com.