Microsoft for Startups automated verification repeatedly fails for a legally registered company
I am the founder of LYCI GmbH, a Swiss company legally registered in the Commercial Register of the Canton of Zürich, Switzerland. My Microsoft for Startups business verification has failed on several attempts. All company details are accurate, publicly verifiable, and were checked and confirmed in my support ticket. Support consulted their Engineering team and confirmed the startup verification process is fully automated by design. There is no team able to manually review, override, or approve verification requests, and no mechanism to identify or disclose which specific check failed. Engineering confirmed no manual verification or exception is possible, and the ticket was then closed. This leaves a legally registered company, with all information publicly verifiable, no path forward through the standard channel. Please find closed the ticket: Tracking ID [2606250050001977]. Request: Could a moderator please escalate this to the Microsoft for Startups program/verification team for manual review?
Azure Startup Credit Issue
Hi, I've been trying to verify my LinkedIn account to unlock $1,000 in Azure startup credits for over a week. Every time the OAuth callback hits error and, I get: {"error":{"code":"BadRequest","message":"BadRequest (Conflict)"}}. I've revoked all LinkedIn app permissions on both LinkedIn and Microsoft sides. I suspect that the issue is an orphaned LinkedIn identity record in your backend from a previous failed attempt. My support ticket has gone unanswered for over a week now and I also created a post in the learn community that went unanswered for days now. Could you point me to the right person? Happy to provide any account details needed.
$17,493 in Undisclosed Marketplace Charges with No Cost Visibility, No Recourse, No Accountability
I'm a co-founder of a 13-person startup in the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub program. I'm posting here because after two months of support tickets, calls, and emails across both Microsoft and Anthropic, I have been unable to get anyone with decision-making authority to address this issue. I'm hoping this reaches someone at Microsoft who can help, and that other affected founders in the program will share their experiences. What happened: In February 2026, we deployed Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 through Azure AI Foundry as part of a migration of our AI infrastructure. We are active users of our Azure sponsorship credits and assumed, as anyone would, that these models were covered the same way Azure OpenAI models are. There was no indication otherwise during deployment. In early March, we received our first invoice: $1,078.07 (invoice G144899694, billing period 02/01–02/28). We were shocked, but we paid it immediately and removed all Anthropic model deployments from our account to prevent further charges. It didn't matter. On April 9, we received a second invoice: $16,414.94 (invoice G151890529, billing period 03/01–03/31). Despite removing the deployments in mid-March, charges had already accumulated for the first half of the month. We are unable to pay this invoice. Our total exposure across both invoices is $17,493.01. Why we had no way to prevent this: No billing distinction at deployment. Azure AI Foundry presents all models (Microsoft-native and third-party) in the same unified interface. There is no warning, label, or confirmation step indicating that certain models are excluded from sponsorship credits. No cost visibility whatsoever. The Azure AI Foundry monitoring dashboard has an "Estimated Cost" section that is completely blank for these models, with a disclaimer: "Cost monitoring is available for Foundry Models sold directly by Azure only." We could see token counts but had zero visibility into what we were being charged. Token counts that don't explain the charges. The dashboards show our Claude Opus 4.6 deployment used 63.4M tokens and our Sonnet 4.6 deployments used roughly 170M tokens combined. At published rates, that should be in the low thousands, not $17,500. My analysis shows the dashboard hides billions of cached tokens (prompt caching reads and writes) that are invisible in the monitoring UI but account for the vast majority of the bill. There is no view in Azure that provides a breakdown of these charges by token type. No alerts or notifications. There were no cost alerts, no threshold warnings, and no notifications at any point. No indication in any Azure portal that charges were hitting our credit card. There was no line item, no pending charge, no Marketplace spend summary - nothing anywhere in the Azure ecosystem that showed dollars accumulating against our payment method for these deployments. What happened when we asked for help: Azure Support (TrackingID#2603090040002936): After a month-long wait, a support engineer told us Microsoft cannot issue credits for Marketplace charges and directed us to Anthropic. The first version of the response email referenced "Azure DDoS Protection Standard" instead of our actual issue, suggesting the volume of similar cases in the queue. Anthropic: Their AI support bot responded within one minute with a blanket statement and closed the ticket four hours later. I escalated, but have still not received a response over a month later. Microsoft for Startups Team (TrackingID#2604070040009778): Told us they cannot apply Marketplace charges against sponsorship credits and referred us to a Marketplace billing contact. Azure Marketplace billing contact: Pending response. The pattern is clear: Microsoft directs us to Anthropic. Anthropic directs us to Microsoft. The Microsoft for Startups team directs us to Azure Marketplace billing. No one takes responsibility. What I'm asking for: A full refund of $17,493.01 across invoices G144899694 and G151890529 That Microsoft implement clear billing warnings in Azure AI Foundry before deploying models that are excluded from sponsorship credits. That Microsoft provide actual cost visibility in the monitoring dashboard for all models deployed through AI Foundry, not just first-party models. To other founders in the program: If you have experienced this same issue, please reply to this thread. I know I'm not alone because this has been covered by The Register, InfoWorld, and Computerworld, and at least 20 founders have signed a Change.org petition about it. The more founders who come forward with specific amounts and case numbers, the harder this is to ignore. We joined Microsoft for Startups because the program was supposed to help early-stage companies manage infrastructure costs during the most financially vulnerable period of our growth. Instead, the program's own platform generated charges within 2 weeks that exceed the total sponsorship credits we've consumed over the past year, with no visibility, no warning, and no path to resolution. With Further Inc. | Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub Azure Support TrackingID #2603090040002936 Startup Support TrackingID #2604070040009778
Unable to see Azure credits for verified startup business
TL;DR: Business verification only completed a few weeks ago (Feb 2026), can't see Azure for Startup credits anywhere on my account, would like to activate my $5000 credits and put them to use building my application which will leverage Azure in a number of ways. Help needed! Details: I have an early stage startup, pre-money, pre-product. Building a native Microsoft/Windows 11 application for AI data analysis with cloud hosted private LLMs. I signed up for a business M365 account back in September 2025 which was fine for my M365 Office Suite access (OneDrive, OneNote, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint), however my business verification ran into mysterious obstacles (it is a Delaware C Corp, incorporated in 2025), so I couldn't setup my corporate developer accounts. Fast forward to February 2026, and I finally push through the business verification steps, and am now working full time on my business (as of late January 2026). I am "in" the Azure for Startups program, but I can't access this "Founders Hub" area that I'm reading about, and I can't see in my Azure Billing/Invoicing area anything other than my corporate credit card for payments -- no evidence of $1000 or $5000 startup credits for Azure. What am I missing? What did I do wrong? Is there any way I can activate these now that I'm actually in a position where I need them, now that I have my business verified with Microsoft? Thank you in advance for any assistance anyone can provide on this point!