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If you're new to Azure, you can create an Azure free account to explore Azure AI Search and other services at no charge. The free account provides credits that you can use to create and test services for 30 days.
This article explains how to maximize the value of your Azure free account to quickly and efficiently evaluate Azure AI Search.
Prerequisites
- An internet connection and a supported web browser.
- A phone number, credit or debit card, and Microsoft or GitHub account to create an Azure free account.
Create an Azure free account
To try Azure AI Search for free, sign up for an Azure free account.
The free account is active for 30 days and includes credits that allow you to create billable services at no charge. Currently, the credits are equivalent to USD200. This amount is subject to change, so verify the credit on the sign-up page.
Choose a region
You can optionally integrate Azure AI Search with Foundry Tools for AI enrichment, integrated vectorization, and multimodal search. For billing purposes, you must attach your Microsoft Foundry resource to your search service via a keyless connection (preview) or key-based connection. Key-based connections require both services to be in the same region.
Before you create resources for a key-based connection, confirm regional support:
Azure AI Search regions: The AI enrichment column indicates whether Azure AI Search and Microsoft Foundry are in the same region.
Azure Vision regions: The Multimodal embeddings column indicates regional support for the multimodal APIs that enable text and image vectorization. Azure Vision provides these APIs, which you access through a Microsoft Foundry resource. Ensure that Azure AI Search and Microsoft Foundry are in the same region as the multimodal APIs.
Tip
If you don't need features powered by Foundry Tools, ignore the Azure Vision regions and choose an Azure AI Search region that provides the features and capacity you need.
Choose a pricing model and tier
Azure AI Search offers two pricing models: Dedicated and Serverless (Preview). For a free-trial account, you can evaluate Dedicated Free and Basic tiers, and you can also try the Serverless Developer tier at no charge during the initial preview period while reviewing estimated usage costs. Microsoft provides at least 30 days notice before Serverless Developer billing begins.
Free doesn't consume credits and provides 50 MB of storage. You can have one free search service per Azure subscription. This tier is always free and doesn't expire, even after your 30-day trial ends. However, it doesn't support semantic ranking or managed identities for Microsoft Entra ID authentication and authorization, which are commonly used in quickstarts.
Basic (recommended) is in the Dedicated pricing model, consumes about one-third of your USD200 credits over 30 days, and provides 15 GB of storage in most regions. This tier supports all features, including semantic ranking and managed identities, and runs on dedicated infrastructure for consistent performance.
Serverless Developer (Preview) is in the Serverless pricing model and uses consumption-based pricing. During the initial preview period, you can evaluate estimated usage costs without billing. Microsoft provides at least 30 days notice before billing begins.
Important
The Serverless Developer tier is currently in preview. This preview is provided without a service-level agreement and isn't recommended for production workloads. Certain features might not be supported or might have constrained capabilities. For more information, see Supplemental Terms of Use for Microsoft Azure Previews.
Billing for the Serverless Developer tier isn't yet enabled during the preview. Estimated costs for your usage are available in the Azure portal and telemetry, but that usage won't appear on your Azure bill during this initial period. Microsoft will provide at least 30 days notice before billing begins. The deferral of billing during this preview is temporary. Serverless Developer is a paid tier and you'll be responsible for any charges accrued once billing begins.
The Serverless Developer tier doesn't support migration to or from other pricing tiers and some features available on other tiers aren't supported during Public Preview. Service limits, supported features, and pricing details may change before general availability.
The preview is currently only available in West Central US, Switzerland North, and Japan East.
Note
Free search services that remain inactive for an extended period of time might be deleted to free up capacity, should the region be experiencing capacity constraints.
Create resources
Most Azure AI Search scenarios require the following resources:
Create an Azure AI Search service. Choose the pricing model and tier that fit your needs and, if applicable, the same region as Microsoft Foundry. Most Azure AI Search regions provide higher-capacity storage limits. Only a few have older, lower limits. For the Dedicated Basic tier, confirm that you have a 15-GB partition during service creation.
Create an Azure Storage account to index your own files. Choose a general purpose account and use the default settings.
Create a Microsoft Foundry resource to use AI enrichment in your indexing workloads and the Azure Vision multimodal APIs as an embedding model provider.
Run a quickstart
To get started with Azure AI Search, try one of the following quickstarts:
- Quickstart: Agentic retrieval (portal or programmatic)
- Quickstart: Keyword search (portal or programmatic)
- Quickstart: Vector search (portal or programmatic)
You can also explore the azure-search-vector-samples GitHub repository or solution accelerators. Many samples and accelerators include Bicep scripts that deploy all Azure resources and dependencies, allowing you to quickly explore operational solutions.
Use a portal to explore features
You can access Azure AI Search through two portals, each optimized for different scenarios:
| Portal | Description | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Azure portal | The primary management interface for Azure resources and your Azure AI Search service. This portal is most useful for classic search scenarios and overall resource management. |
|
| Microsoft Foundry portal | A unified platform for deploying models and building AI applications. This portal is most useful for agentic retrieval (RAG) scenarios. |
|
Track your credit usage
During the trial period, stay under the USD200 credit allocation. Dedicated services are billed for provisioned capacity while they exist, even when idle. If you create a Dedicated Basic search service, expect Azure AI Search to consume about one-third of your available credits during the trial period. Serverless Developer (Preview) billing behavior is covered in the preview notice above, and you should still monitor estimated usage.
In the Azure portal, a notification in the upper-right corner shows how many credits have been used and how many remain. You can also monitor billing by searching for Subscriptions in the topmost search bar. The Overview page shows spending rates, forecasts, and cost management. For more information, see Check usage of free services included with your Azure free account.
Next step
Ready to move beyond exploration? After your free trial ends, learn how to plan and manage capacity and plan and manage costs for production workloads.