The subscription you choose will depend on the type of project you are doing and its scale. If you are doing some experimentation or prototyping a system, which may never go into production, you may just want to use a free trial, which is time- and usage-limited, or go for a Pay-as-you-go option, where you pay for what you use rather than committing to a fixed payment. If you're a university student, your university may apply for a 5-month Educator Grant at http://www.microsoftazurepass.com/azureu.
To get started, you may need to do some design work to get some idea of the services you may require, what service tier you want, and how many instances of each service you may use, then go to the pricing calculator and start working out how much your monthly expenditure might be. There is a complete chapter dedicated to designing a system, and this whole book will help you choose which services you require, but we need a subscription to get started, so we'll talk about it now.
Once we have an idea about what our monthly expenditure might be, we can take a look at the purchase options page at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/purchase-options/.
The following table taken from the purchase options page shows us the discounts based on the base Pay-as-you-go rate and monthly commitment to spend in USD (there is a picker on the left-hand side of the page to change the currency):
|
Monthly Committed Spend |
6-Month Monthly Pay |
12-Month Monthly Pay |
6-Month Pre-Pay |
12-Month Pre-Pay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
$500 TO £14,999 |
20% |
22.5% |
22.5% |
25% |
|
$15,000 TO £39,999 |
23% |
25.5% |
25.5% |
28% |
|
$40,000 AND ABOVE |
27% |
29.5% |
29.5% |
30% |
As with most commodities, the more you commit to spend, the better discount you get, and you save even more committing to pay for the whole term in one go.
You can pay by invoice as well as by credit card; the page at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/invoicing/ has details about requesting invoiced payments.