Does creating a Personal Access Token in Azure DevOps cost anything in the Free Tier?

Question

I want to create a Personal Access Token to upload my VS Code extension to the Marketplace. Will this incur any billing charges in the Azure DevOps Free Tier, or is it completely free? Please share your advice.

https://code.visualstudio.com/api/working-with-extensions/publishing-extension#get-a-personal-access-token

Answer 1

Hi @Dev Cyberscope ,

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A.

Creating and using a Personal Access Token (PAT) in Azure DevOps Free Tier won’t cost you anything. PATs are purely an authentication mechanism and aren’t a billed resource. You just need an Azure DevOps organization (the Free Tier gives you one by default) and you can generate as many PATs as you like without incurring charges.

What to watch out for

• If you start running Azure Pipelines with Microsoft-hosted agents beyond the free minutes, you’d pay for those extra build minutes but that’s unrelated to simply generating a PAT.
• Publishing a VS Code extension via vsce publish uses the PAT to authenticate against the Marketplace; it doesn’t spin up billable compute in Azure DevOps.

References:

• Get a PAT for publishing VS Code extensions
• PAT fundamentals in Azure DevOps

Hope this helps!

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Answer 2

Creating a Personal Access Token (PAT) in Azure DevOps is free and does not by itself incur any charges. A PAT is simply a way to authenticate and authorize actions like pushing a VS Code extension to the Marketplace or interacting with Azure DevOps REST APIs.

In the context of the Azure DevOps Free Tier, you get a limited amount of free resources, primarily tied to build pipelines, users, and storage. Generating a PAT and using it to publish an extension does not consume those paid resources, so it remains within the free tier as long as you don’t exceed other usage limits like hosted build minutes or additional users beyond the free allowance.

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hth

Marcin