What are the limitations of the free Visual Studio Online license?

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On the Visual Studio Online website there is a free account option. It says that this account offers the following benefits:

  • 5 FREE basic user licenses
  • Unlimited Participants
  • Unlimited MSDN Qualified Subscribers
  • Private code repositories and unlimited team projects
  • FREE work items tracking for all users
  • 60 minutes / month FREE build
  • 20 thousand minutes of virtual user / month of FREE load testing
  • VISUALIZATION application analysis and monitoring

It turns out that this is too much advantage. Private repositories on GitHub are paid and this account offers unlimited private repositories for free. As it seems to have a lot of advantage there I was wondering about the limitations of this account.

What limitations does this license offer? Can commercial projects be hosted there or only open source or free projects? Is it like Visual Studio Community that can be used without limitations for developers working outside of business?

    
asked by anonymous 30.01.2015 / 20:14

1 answer

6

That's exactly what you described. Can not Microsoft give too many advantages to its users? :)

Any project can be hosted there. Anyone can use under any circumstances.

In fact it is not so advantageous for some types of users. If more than 5 people can access the project you have to leave for the payment. But if your team is small it's free indeed. There is no catch. And you can still have extra users as long as they have an active paid account on MSDN (which comes with some editions of Visual Studio).

Note that you can access work items and some other things for users outside the project without restriction. In other words, all your users can see and include tickets , follow the evolution of the project. They just can not access the project as a whole and run anything, and it's probably not what you really want.

As far as I know, it is not yet available in Portuguese (this may be out of date).

For teams so I doubt that the other limitations are very problematic, and in fact even they are about things that Github, for example, does not offer.

Of course MS is not being nice. She is giving a lot of grace to those who can not afford it. But competition is also giving. It may not be the same thing, but they give others. It needs to show that it is cheap to use its technologies. And she still earns a lot from who needs more and can pay for it. These use MS products because they need it, free stuff will not influence them.

MS also hopes that one day you use free grow and be a paying user.

    
30.01.2015 / 20:36
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