Microsoft for Startups Program Graduation

Microsoft for Startups is designed as a time-bound program, and graduation is a normal milestone as companies grow. Graduation doesn't impact your ability to continue building with Microsoft. As part of your graduation from Microsoft for Startups, the program-specific benefits associated with the Microsoft for Startups program conclude.  

What Happens After Graduation 

Azure Subscription and Billing

Your Azure subscription continues without interruption
Your Azure subscription and workloads continue running after graduation. However, Microsoft for Startups sponsorship benefits and credits end.

When your sponsorship ends:

• Any remaining Microsoft for Startups Azure credits expire.
• Your subscription no longer receives sponsorship funding.
• Your subscription transitions to the applicable commercial billing arrangement, such as pay-as-you-go (PAYG), Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA), or MCA-E.
• Ongoing usage is billed according to that arrangement and the payment method associated with your Azure account.

Review your billing information

To help avoid billing disruption:

• Verify that your payment information is up to date before your sponsorship ends.
• Confirm that the appropriate commercial billing arrangement is configured for your subscription.
• Billing and subscription-management assistance remains available through Azure after graduation.

Important: The billing transition doesn't extend the Microsoft for Startups support benefit. Billing and technical support are managed separately.

Technical support after graduation

The sponsorship-provided support benefit ends when your sponsorship ends. If you need technical support after graduation:

• Purchase an eligible Azure support plan before your sponsorship ends, or confirm that other applicable support coverage is in place.
• If you already have a support plan, confirm that it is associated with the subscription you will continue using.
• Review the available Azure support plans and select coverage and response times appropriate for your workloads.

Continue scaling with Microsoft 

Graduation marks a transition. It isn't the end of your relationship with Microsoft. As you grow beyond the program, you can continue to build on our technology and rely on Microsoft’s enterprise-grade infrastructure, security, and AI services to support you at every stage of growth. 

Microsoft continues to provide resources to support your growth. You might find technical and go-to-market guidance through Frontier Accelerate for Marketplace (FAM), which provides resources for building and publishing solutions on Microsoft platforms.

Optimize and save on Azure 

As you continue building with Microsoft, there are several tools and best practices available to help you improve performance while managing costs.  

Optimize your virtual machines
  Review simple strategies to right-size workloads, improve efficiency, and reduce unnecessary compute spend. 
Quick tips to optimize virtual machines on Azure 

Monitor and manage your costs
  Use Azure Cost Management tools to track usage, forecast spending, and identify opportunities to optimize your environment.  Introduction to cost management and savings 

Prompt engineering techniques
  Leverage practical patterns for getting better, more reliable outputs from your models.  Prompt engineering techniques 

Azure AI security best practices
  Secure Azure AI workloads with governance, identity and network controls, and data protection best practices.  Azure AI security best practices