DevOps - billing for many external users

[RubBerGFM]

Hi,

I manage a small DevOps organization currently using the Basic free plan. I need to add more than 10 external developers to a single repository. Although they will not all work simultaneously—typically in groups of two or three at a time—I'm exploring how to manage user access effectively to remain within the limit of 5 users per team.

One solution I've considered is assigning stakeholder access to users who are not actively working on the project. Is there a more efficient way to handle this automatically?

Essentially, I want to avoid paying for additional "CALs" when only one or two external developers require access at any given time. Nonetheless, I'd like each developer to have their own account for when they need to work on the project.

Thanks for your help,

Ruben

[#2]

@RubBerGFM 

It may challenge and manual work to prevent the 'upgrade' in Azure DevOps, such as assign and remove user from the group

[#3]

Thanks for the reply, @Kidd_Ip . I know that moving the users manually can be an effort, but I haven't found anything to automate it. I could limit my supplier to assigning a small number of licenses (three to five), but I don't want to purchase unnecessary licenses just to add inactive users to my team. Alternatively, I have to update the active users manually.
Hope someone will suggest a better idea to automate this.
Thanks again :)

[#4]

@RubBerGFM up.

Anyone with a better idea?