Forum Discussion
Request: remove credit card registration when signing up for a Free Azure account.
that money is Fake, just a virtual token to allow users to test Azure services.
Many services that offer trial test accounts do the same thing,
for example Spotify trial.
it's like Spotify tell you that you have 10$ on your account and you can use it to test Spotify premium for 1 month. so what? does it mean they are giving you 10$ real money? Of course Not. it's just ANOTHER WAY of Saying that they are letting trial users test their service for 1 month. i'm surprised that it's so hard to understand for some people...
so it's not the reason why Microsoft is asking free trial users for their credit card details.
But your trial is still a cost to those companies - in Azure's case you are still using resources; power, compute, storage, the infrastructure set up to run resources.
I imagine some bean counter counter has figured out all the variables on the most effective way they can entice orgs to try Azure with the least cost to them and the highest retention rate. Throwing up an additional barrier like needing a credit card is going to reduce the amount of people gaming the system and the cost to MS. Setting up 5 new gmail accounts is relatively non-trivial compared to applying for 5 credit cards. I suspect there's probably some psychology involved about putting your credit card info in at the start so it's already ready when the trial ends, but that kind of stuff is beyond me.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fact is, Spotify have their own guys to work out the money and figure they can give people 3 months free and the retention rate is sufficient for that to make financial sense to them. Fwiw, I believe AWS also requires a credit card to sign up.
- That's not the point here. the other user was trying to justify the credit card requirement by saying that there are real money in between so credit card is needed to prevent fraud. and i proved it's not needed since there is no real money and all there is is fake non-transferable credits.
trial user will use resources yes of course, obviously, that's the whole point of it when Microsoft decided to offer their services for free. and again it doesn't justify credit card requirement. whether or not a user enters the credit card, they can still use the resources and STOP using the resources when their free trail ends. so at the end they will pay nothing to Microsoft and still use their resources. see? nothing related to credit card requirement.Nobody has said you get $200 real money that you can withdraw. You get $200 worth of credit.
How easy would it be for bitcoin mining or similar to constantly generate fake email accounts, establish a lot of miners and spend the $200 bucks, before the account was closed?
Automate it, and you can provision up hundreds or thousands of subscriptions continuously and not pay a dime.
I guess they could make another offering; either a free trial account with credit card info and $200 credit, or a free account with no credit, and the need to enter a credit card if purchasing anything (apart from free services). However, I bet they would have to do a lot of segregation, as free services also sometimes utilize paid services (like storage accounts) etc.
