Manage paid access for users

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following items in place:

Prerequisites

Assign Basic or Basic + Test Plans

The easiest way to control paid access is to manually assign an access level. You can assign the access level when you add a new user to your organization. Also, remove users when they leave your organization.

Keep the following information in mind:

• Visual Studio subscribers get detected automatically when they sign in. There's no extra charge for users with a Visual Studio subscription.
• GitHub Enterprise users get detected automatically when they sign in. There's no extra charge for users with a GitHub Enterprise license.
• Stakeholder access is a free access level with limited functionality.
• Basic access is free for the first 5 users and paid for 6 or more users.
• Basic + Test Plans access is paid only, but free to try for 30 days.

Select default access level for new users

All new users get the free Stakeholder access if they're added directly to a project.

To change the access level for new users added to projects, do the following steps:

1. Sign in to your organization (https://dev.azure.com/{Your_Organization}).

2. Select Organization settings.

   

3. Select Billing.

   

4. Next to Default access level for new users, choose Basic from the dropdown menu.

   

Automate access with group rules

Group rules provide a great way to automate access level assignment for your organization. This way, you don't have to manually assign access each time a user gets added or removed. For more information, see Group rules.

Reduce charges for users with no access

Billing stops automatically when users get removed from your organization or are assigned the free Stakeholder access level.

To find out if you have users who are no longer using Azure DevOps, do the following steps:

1. Sign in to your organization (https://dev.azure.com/{yourorganization}).

2. Select Organization settings.

   

3. Select Users and then sort by Last Access.

   

4. If there are users who haven't signed in, you can find out how recently they were added by exporting the list of users and checking the Date Created column.

   

Pay for a user once across multiple organizations

If you're a member of more than one Azure DevOps organization, you can turn on multi-organization billing and pay for each Basic or Basic + Test Plans human user once, for all organizations under the same billing Azure subscription. Multi-organization billing doesn't apply to service principals, which you must pay for each organization the service principal was added to where the service principal has Basic or Basic + Test Plans.

For more information, see multi-organization billing FAQs. To pay for a user once across multiple organizations, do the following steps:

1. Sign in to your organization (https://dev.azure.com/{Your_Organization}).

2. Select Organization settings.

   

3. Select Billing.

   

4. Select Configure user billing.

   

5. Select Multi-organization > Save.

   

Pay via Azure

To pay via Azure, do the following steps:

1. Create an Azure DevOps organization, even if you don't intend to use it.
2. Set up billing using an Azure subscription and add users or buy CI/CD.
3. Assign licenses to users.

You're entitled to the same number of user licenses to be used in the server.