Visual Studio Dev Essentials
Free dev tools + Azure credits
The catch:
The Azure $200 credit is first-month only and the Azure account requires a credit card; several partner benefits are time-limited trials.
Verification required:
- Microsoft account
- Credit card only for the optional Azure free account
Source announcement
What you get from Visual Studio Dev Essentials for free
Visual Studio Dev Essentials is Microsoft's free developer bundle - no student ID needed.
What you get
- Visual Studio Community (full-featured free IDE)
- Azure free account: $200 first-month credit + 12 months of popular free services
- Azure DevOps, Power Apps Community Plan
- Learning perks: Pluralsight, CODE Magazine, Syncfusion ebooks
How to claim
- Join at visualstudio.microsoft.com/dev-essentials with a Microsoft account
- Activate the benefits you want
- For Azure, create the free account (credit card required for identity check)
The program itself is free forever; individual perks have their own clocks.
History
Verified by a person on · last automated check : no change found. Automated findings never change this page until a person confirms them (how we verify).
- Listedby a person
- Verifiedby a person
Still works?
Work at Microsoft? Add an aifree.dev badge
HTML
<a href="https://aifree.dev/offer/vs-dev-essentials"><img src="https://aifree.dev/badge/vs-dev-essentials" alt="Visual Studio Dev Essentials on aifree.dev" height="20"></a>Markdown
[](https://aifree.dev/offer/vs-dev-essentials)More free coding tools
Related offers
Devin Free Plan
Free tier - Light agent coding quota
LLM7.io Free Tier
100,000 tokens/day - 100,000 tokens per 24 hours with a free token (input + output combined)
IteraCompute free Qwen3.8-27B
30,000,000 tokens/month - 30M tokens/month on the free tier (input + output, incl. reasoning)
Appwrite Education plan
6 months - 6 months of Pro-resources access, one-time per account
BrowserStack student plan
12 months - One-year license via the GitHub Student Pack