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Story
Microsoft won't let me pay a $24 bill, blocking thousands in Azure spending
Two years ago, a $24 autopay charge on my Azure account failed. The invoice is now marked "Locked" in their billing portal.

I cannot pay this invoice. There is no button to pay it. There is no button to dismiss it. There is no way to interact with it at all.

Azure displays a banner: "You must pay all previous invoices before creating new subscriptions." Fair enough. I would love to pay it. Microsoft won't let me.

So I tried to contact support.

The Azure portal requires a "paid support plan" to create a support ticket. To purchase a paid support plan, you must create a subscription. To create a subscription, you must clear outstanding invoices. To clear outstanding invoices, you must contact support.

Azure on Twitter, as well as the website claims to have a "free support ticket" option for billing issues, but every possible link just drives you back to the same FAQ page while refusing to let you submit a ticket.

I called every number I could find:

1-800-867-1389 rings busy indefinitely. 1-855-270-0615 connects to an AI that asks what you need, tells you to visit the website, and disconnects. 1-800-642-7676 connects to a different AI that also tells you to visit the website. The website has a chatbot that redirects you to FAQ articles regardless of what you type. If you express frustration, it throws an error and stops responding.

I submitted feedback through the Azure portal every few days for weeks. No response.

I am a software engineer, so I did something ridiculous.

I wrote a PowerShell WinForms application that authenticates via device code flow, queries the Az.Support API for problem classifications, and calls New-AzSupportTicketsNoSubscription to submit a billing support ticket directly, bypassing the portal entirely.

Note the API name: NoSubscription. Microsoft has an explicit API for ticketing without a subscription.

It worked. The ticket was submitted. I felt briefly victorious.

The API responded: "Your support plan type is Free. To create and update support tickets, you need access to our high-tier support plans."

I had built custom software specifically to work around Microsoft's broken support infrastructure, and I still hit a paywall.

The total amount Microsoft is owed: $24.

The total amount Microsoft is preventing me from spending on new Azure services: thousands. I currently run numerous websites out of my house, and it's getting to be enough that I want to offload it to Azure VMs. Additionally, I was going to shift my development to Azure boxes, etc.

I have exhausted every official channel. Every phone number, every chatbot, every feedback form, every API endpoint. There is no path to a human being without first paying for a support plan that I cannot purchase because of the billing block that I need support to resolve.

Has anyone successfully escaped a loop like this? Is there a secret handshake I'm missing? Or is the only option to abandon this Microsoft account entirely, get a new phone, and start fresh?

You have a lot more perseverance than I do. I would have opened up an AWS or GCP account after step one. I'm the one with the money and any company that makes it difficult for me to give it to them isn't worth my time.
Not even kidding, despite being tied to Azure here at work, I'm TEMPTED to spin my stuff up on AWS and use it to convince my branch to switch to AWS for future projects. That will move their losses into the tens of thousands per month if I can convince them.
I had the almost same experience as OP. Only difference is that I really wanted to play Minecraft.
Or even better, to use this opportunity to set up your own servers saving money and hassle in the long run.
Have you tried going through Sales? Account teams can usually move mountains if they can see a clear path to a paycheque - you might have luck just by going to the 'chat with me' popup on the azure home page and saying you have thousands of budget and would like to chat with a rep.
I attempted to say I needed to speak to a sales representative. The AI ran me through the standard question gauntlet.

I closed the browser entirely, reopened it, and then told the AI that I "have a large budget and need to speak to a sales assistant". It then asked one question: "Is this for a business or personal purchase?" I said business, and then boom, immediate connection to a human.

THEY were able to submit the support ticket for me. But their recommendation? Just create a new account entirely. Which, obviously, is NOT an answer.

When your ONLY source of "help" is the only people in the company you can reach telling you to just "give up" on your primary account, I think it's time to switch vendors.

Salespeople are often non-tech despite working for tech-firms, non-tech people are the ones who usually create messes by workarounds since they often quickly give up instead of reporting.

If the non-reporting is a problem of the non-techs or techs at a company is an open question, but it's often a shared problem connected to non-techs coming with stupid things at one point and fundamentally important stuff at other times.

Anyhow, they usually should know how to get proper escalation to get shit done when hounded enough.

I let them know that if this isn't solved by COB tomorrow, I'll be pushing the client to switch to a new vendor. Then I received the email for the support ticket and see that they set it at the lowest priority.

I've already started playing with AWS to see how hard it is to spin up VMs there.

There's also digital ocean and hertzner cloud if you don't want to enter the AWS money pit. Though if you're looking to become a forensic accountant, AWS billing is great training
That should tell you everything you need to know…
well I never said their sales team was good ha

Thanks for closing the loop - always interesting to hear about any progress when stuck in a bureaucratic logjam.

So to fully close the loop, I convinced the client to go to AWS after this week's debacle. I showed them how simple it was to spin up a new box on AWS, and everything just worked. Then, I showed them how DIRECTLY within the AI help interface, as SOON as you say you "need to speak to a human" it gives you the SUPPORT TICKET INTERFACE to fill out RIGHT there. No "you must have a support contract to ask about a billing question" horseshit. DIRECT access to the support ticket system.

The customer has agreed that we should pivot to AWS. Microsoft has officially lost a $10M, 10 year contract, and it's going to their primary competitor.

I wonder how often this really happens, just so they can save a few bucks on tech support?

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Honestly? As obvious as that seems, I didn't think of it. I'll try that now.
Doesn't help fix your problem, but I have a similar issue with Google Cloud Platform. Years ago I had a free workplace account that I had some small company emails and what not on, and apparently at some point over the years I setup a GCP project or two. Fast forward to the modern day and I haven't used the account in years so I decide to delete it. As the admin I hit the delete account button and it complains that I have services still active, so I go disable all the services which includes removing the workplace subsccription with all my billing info. I then hit delete again, at which point it complains that I have a project on GCP (not active, just created). So I go to delete it... which requires having a (paid) workspace account. So I can't delete the unused project without paying to re-activate the workspaces account I deleted, and I can't delete the whole account without deleting the GCP project. And of course Google has literally no support, so I just have a Google account hanging out there somewhere, probably with vaguely sensitive information from years ago on it, waiting for someone to guess the password or otherwise get into it.
The universe is saving you from spending money on Microsoft services. This is a good thing, stop trying to fight it and find a better, more worthy alternative.
Funny enough i think AI everywhere will in fact give such a nice clear push with a smile on its face to small companies and individuals away from business with the big companies.

Divine goodness can find cracks through the evil veil of capitalism

  • rdtsc
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Do you have to use Azure? Maybe Azure is nice and signaling this way the state of the internals and how things will work from here on. So it's sneakily trying to help you move to somewhere else, before things become worse and you spend the thousands and then end up stuck.
:D It's a valid argument. Perhaps they're quietly trying to do me a favor? Unfortunately, my company has gone this direction, so they're stuck in my sphere whether I like it or not.
That's fine as it is your company's money. You, however, do not need to give Microsoft any of your money. I get it's convenient as you're already using it at work so the familiarity is convenient. It's why I've used AWS for a couple of side hustle projects because I had familiarity from using it at work. Trying to unthink AWS to learn to think like GCP/Azure would have only slowed me down on the side hustle.

It's definitely damned if you do, damned if you don't regardless of which cloud provider is being discussed. They all have their own thorns

If you want to sign Windows binaries, Azure is the best way now.
Why do you say that? Things like SignPath exist: https://signpath.io/knowledge-base/introduction

We've been using them for over a year now for signing the DB Browser for SQLite executables: https://sqlitebrowser.org/blog/signing-windows-executables-o...

I ran into a similar issue with Hetzner. I had an outstanding bill that I forgot about (going to an email inbox I don't check often). They closed my account, and I haven't been able to pay the bill. I've tried contacting support, but I haven't got anywhere. I would love to pay the bill. I would really like to use Hetzner again, but I think I accidentally got banned. Also, I'm talking about an $8 dollar debt owed I accrued while not realizing my autopay was failing on a VM.
Hi there, I am sorry you had this negative experience us with us. For very late invoices, we lock accounts and ask that users pay using a bank/wire transfer. https://docs.hetzner.com/general/others/late-payments-faqs Was your account fairly new? We tend to be more careful with newer accounts because of fraud and abuse. If an invoice is very late, we do not re-open the account until the invoice is paid. (Again, because of fraud and abuse). But our support teams would very likely have asked you to pay using a bank/wire transfer. It's not that we don't want people to pay their invoices. We just want them to use a more reliable form of payment once that happens. If you still have access to your old invoice (perhaps you still have your email with it), you can still pay it. Your customer number will be on your invoice and you can use that or the invoice number in the reason for the payment. Since it is far in the past, we could not re-activate your account. It might be possible, however, to create a new account. --Katie
Wow. You're the second person to mention Hetzner doing this same mess. I hadn't heard of them prior to this. Their reputation is preceding them.
Yeah. Avoid Hetzner.

I used to use and recommend them, but not any more. Screw them. :(

Yeah, German customer support is not very customer-facing ("customer is right" attitude does not exist).
Hetzner has a similar loop. Autopay fails and they lock your account, keeping you from logging in to pay it.

I emailed support, &bthey insisted on a wire transfer. I sent that & they said they didn't get it. I sent them all the details my bank could find, but they kept asking for some paper document, which doesn't exist afaik because it was all done online.

Hi there, (I am not trying to be critical. I am genuinely curious what could have gone wrong in your case.) Are you sure that they were asking for a *piece of paper*, or for a confirmation number for the bank/wire transfer? Our team will sometimes ask for the confirmation number to help speed up the process on our end. Some people also underestimate how much time it can take for a payment like this to arrive at our billing team. When you sent the payment, did you include your Hetzner customer number or invoice number in the reason for the payment when you filled at the form for the bank/wire transfer? If you didn't do that, it is much more difficult for our team to process that payment. --Katie
That sounds so incredibly German. They love paper, and have zero understanding when that paper simply doesn't exist in a non-German system.
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Paper works offline and with electricity
Cool. Doesn't solve the problem of German bureaucrats (corporate or government) expecting papers that simply do not exist in the country of the person being requested papers of. This really happens all the time and is quite vexing to the people experiencing it.
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The same is true the other way around. When they expect a digital information that doesn’t exist in your country.

That’s just incompatible bureaucracies. The medium doesn‘t matter

Wow. I'm not familiar with Hetzner, but it sounds like that's a good thing.
It's a pity to me, because they have an incredible set of offerings that are very reasonably priced. Alas that they are so bad at taking money.
I recently tried to sign up for the Microsoft Partner Network and the entire experience was grueling and excruciating from start to finish. I wasted two days on it and never managed to sign up.
Two days? I have been trying for 2 fucking years! I initially registered with <foo>corp.com domain email because that's what I use for Office 365 email account. They denied saying my domain doesn't match. So I tried to change the domain to <foo>.com and it appears to do it, but they keep saying they are still seeing the original domain. The entire Partner Network site is incredibly buggy, half of the site errors out. Their support is a total waste of time, they keep copy/pasting the same message over and over.
Sounds similar to my problem. At some point my Microsoft account was linked with an old startup email as a backup. I've updated it to fully remove it and set my gmail as primary. Yet I am still receiving subscription/billing emails to that old address, which fortunately is being forwarded. The UI simply does not reflect reality.

When I contact Support I tell them the whole problem at the start. Then eventually an agent comes on and asks me a dumb question. If I don't respond quickly enough they close the chat and the whole process restarts.

Have you ever tried to just simply set up an Azure VM that you can remote RDP into?

It's literally easier to just set up a fully functional active directory network in your basement.

Wow people love Microsoft so much that they are ready to go to such lengths to pay them money.
It's not love, it's existing infrastructure. Do you rebuild your entire production environment every time a vendor has a billing hiccup?
No, our existing infrastructure has existed longer than Azure existed. Azure is pretty new in town, I doubt there was much infrastructure built on it. So I believe people really wanted to re-build their infra out from AWS or GCP into Azure in the first place.

Basically my point is -- why rebuilding existing GCP/AWS infra into Azure in the first place? More so if it wasn't on any "cloud" at all before.

> Basically my point is -- why rebuilding existing GCP/AWS infra into Azure in the first place? More so if it wasn't on any "cloud" at all before.

I'm confused. That isn't my scenario at all.

Could I interest you in some sweet data sovereignty? Try a medium size European cloud like Exoscale or one of our French competitors and you'll get better service, plus you'll know what privacy laws protect your data.
For my own projects, I'll sincerely look into it! Stuck with Azure for my client, though.
Would you really stay with a cloud provider after they did this to you? I don't presently use Azure, but if AWS did something like this to me, I would be switching providers immediately.
AWS: here pay... but you cant use a card with CVV. No really.

Bank transfer? No. Check? No. Other method no? Just a 1990s style card without CVV verification.

Didn't they fix that a couple years ago?

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/12/aws-inc-c...

Well not for me. Even support said call your bank and disable it.
I am using cards that have cvv on them for like 10 years with AWS. Different banks. everything just works.
Might be a regional thing then.
For my own projects? This is likely the last straw for me. However, I don't dictate the providers they use at work.
Why not open a new account? Surely for Azure you don't need a unique phone number for each one of them, right? You could run multiple companies after all. (I've got 5 independent AWS accounts, so expect some sanity like that)
It's more the hassle of it already being attached to my email/devices/phone. Honestly, I'll likely have to do this regardless before this gets resolved.
More hassle than being blocked from spending thousands, hanging on multiple calls, debugging support APIs, chasing docs, repeatedly posting feedback, posting for help in HN? Sorry, but this doesn't compute.

You don't need to change your phone to get a new account. And you don't have to change your personal email. And definitely don't need to change the physical device.

Not at all.

By going through that entire process, I now have a very compelling argument to go to the client with to recommend we switch vendors entirely.

Which will not only ultimately lose Microsoft a significant chunk of money, but will save ME future problems when their systems blow up again and I'm once again unable to get an answer better than, "create a new account and start over" once we're well in to the development lifecycle.

If you think you can't get into this kind of Kafkaesque billing nightmare with any large vendor, then I have some bad news for you...
Can't you do "yourname+secondazureaccount@example.com"?
I’m pretty sure that’s a Gmail feature, not every email will support it
This feature was around well before gmail was a conceived. It was documented in RFC 5233 (admittedly an informational rfc) and many vendors support it.
It’s actually a standard feature of the email RFCs, not Gmail.

Nowadays too many sites overzealously claim + is not a valid character…

Print out the invoice, write a check, and mail it in?
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Print out the invoice, and then send it with a check for $24 and letter requiring them process the check against invoice to their legal department via certified USPS letter.
Ah yes, Microsoft, bringing us back to the 1930's methods of financial transactions.
It is worth a try. I have had really good luck with the US Postal Service. People do not get much mail, so if you send it, someone might actually see it. That will never happen with email or any electronic tools.
Please don't give MS any more money. Instead, try a company that will appreciate your business, like fly.io or render, etc. They aren't perfect but believe they will at least respond. ;-)
Maybe don't use Azure? It's not like there are no other options ...
There's a lot more details here I didn't include for the sake of brevity.

The reason I haven't messed with it in 2 years is because the personal project I'm working on (an indie MMO) was put on the back burner. However, my "real job" has asked me to set up some VM dev boxes that we could remote into. They were the ones that wanted Azure, which lead me down the road of trying to set up some boxes on my old account.

When I couldn't, the autist in me wasn't able to just shrug and move on, so I spent the better part of the day trying to "get it to work" when I don't explicitly NEED it for this particular project.

You should probably consult a lawyer, or file a small claims court case for specific performance or refund of your $24 payment delivered by certified mail. In either scenario they will be motivated to accept and process your payment and restore normal services billing to you long before you see the inside of a courtroom, as lawyers cost them much more than $24/hour for an obvious fuckup on their side (and most likely they would have to send an actual executive to small claims court, where lawyers are unwelcome).
Yeah, I've considered starting with an FTC/AG complaint to see if that would get any traction, but I'm still (naively?) crossing my fingers that I can get SOME movement on Twitter.
Uh. Okay. But, like. Thousands of dollars a month in potential spend but no lawyer consult yet? You do you, but it sounds like you just aren't that into Azure. If you’re willing to post an essay about this, put your money where your keyboard is. Everything short of that can be safely and cheaply ignored by Microsoft with no consequence or penalty.
It's not my money, it's the client's.

But this entire process has now given me a solid argument to have them switch vendors.

As for myself? I'm done with Azure entirely after today.

Ah, I missed that in the question, apologies.
Look for cheaper alternatives (many of them in Europe and not only), smaller companies than Microsoft usually have a human to deal with such cases, also their services costs 5-10x less
Universal Commercial Code says that if your agreement does not specify a place of payment you can pay at any Microsoft office building. So check the agreement and if it doesn’t specify a place of payment then take $24 in cash to any Microsoft office building. If this doesn’t work, have a real litigation lawyer send their legal department a letter about them violating UCC and that a lawsuit is incoming.

It’ll get sorted.

At this point, I'm already building boxes on AWS. Fortunately we're building a greenfield app and I still have the opportunity to recommend we pivot our vendor. I'll be posing this argument to my client:

"If Microsoft's solution to a simple billing issue is, 'Create a new account and start over,' then what happens the first time we have a simple issue in our production application? Or even in our development environment during the development stage? Are we just down for weeks until Microsoft tells us, 'Create a new account and start over?'"

I think I have a pretty compelling argument to pivot what would've been an easy $10M (over 10 years) project to a different vendor. I may not be able to win the argument to going to a smaller vendor, but Microsoft just lost a chunk of change if I can sway the client.

Some vendors I use force me to login via MS Live account. The new thing MS is pushing is "Microsoft Authenticator" where I have to use their specific authenticator app or I can't login anymore. No way they could just use TOTP standard like anyone else. Completely crazy. Nothing they do is surprising
MS auth service as such does support TOTP (though even then it won't stop bugging you about the authenticator) but then it probably depends on how those resources are configured. Never been on admin side of it so don't know if it's on by default.
Indeed. I use “OTP Auth” with MS accounts without trouble.
Agreed, but while I'm used to, "We've outsourced our customer support to a country that doesn't understand English," this is the first I've run into, "We've outsourced our customer support to absolutely nobody."
Microsoft sucks, don't bother, use a different cloud. I hear good things about BuyVM
(channeling Patrick McKenzie) If you have an S&P 500 index fund, you're a shareholder in Microsoft. Call their Investor Relations people, or send them a letter with this description. They will probably be of some help!
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For people who might be interested in experiencing this: https://smarthome.steviep.xyz/
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I've gone through some shenanigans like with AWS. I now have a rule that I don't use any cloud providers where I can't get proper customer service which rules out the main big clouds.
I'd say that Microsoft is doing everything right! They have managed to get such high customer loyalty that they can treat you lower than dirt and laugh and spit in your face. And you still do absolutely everything in your power to be able to be a customer of theirs. Even though there are many better options offered by competitors.

People and especially businesses will abuse you as much as you let them. So this is what you get and what you deserve.

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IMO, take your money somewhere else. You don't want this to happen again later with more disasterous consequences.
I am stuck in a similar loop. I was attempting to verify my company account. I have been always told, that verification has failed, but never told why it failed. After few back and forth I have just gave up on whole Azure thing.
It REALLY is starting to feel like the whole, "Scammers purposely add poor spelling and grammar to their phishing attempts to weed out the smart" territory.

It's like Microsoft PURPOSELY wants to weed out any customers that may actually care about their incompetence.

I had to dispute credit card charges with them and disable the card because I couldn't get a way to stop service. You tried harder than I did, which felt too hard
You really persevered!

Like everybody said, I would have dropped this. My only concern is if they send the 24$ to collection and it affects your credit score

I've had the same issue with Google.

I've not paid them a dime for 10 years because they fucked the payment system (imo).

It was just enough friction for me to mostly offload my data from Google's apps/cloud and run it myself.

So, in an odd way, I should thank them ...

I recently dropped $5.5K to set up a 140TB NAS on my home network for the same reason. Though, to be fair, hearing that they regularly have humans going through your E-Mail, private messages, and files was a pretty strong incentive, too.
Escape the loop by dropping them.

Companies this disfunctional do not deserve your business!!!

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I locked myself out of Azure after losing 2FA which turned out to be different 2FA than the one tied to my Microsoft Account.

All support channels are now AI and refuse to help and redirect me to self service. There is _no_ self service path for Azure account recovery if you lose your 2FA token.

It's infuriating. I lost access to a bunch of hobby projects I had hosted on DevOps. Microsoft will never see a dime from me.

@snadella, lil help?
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One of the ways I've used to get past automated telephone call handling to a person is to utter a string of strong profanities.

I hope you get this resolved. Good luck

Microsoft's AIs hang up on you if you do this. (Ask me how I know.) But their chat is even worse. All you have to do is type a few words in caps and it'll refuse to answer.
obligatory xkcd is today's oddly enough. is OP Randle Monroe?

https://xkcd.com/3175/

seriously though customer support from mega corps is almost non existent anymore unless you are big enough to have lawyers negotiating your support contract for you or you have a social media fallowing bigger than some world leaders.

LOL! It seems like they used that as the design document, but removed all paths that lead to success.
Now imagine it's your paying customers infrastructure that got reverse paywalled behind some system bug. That would be reason enough to drop it.
That's effectively the conclusion I've come to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124930#46127017

I'm going to go back to the client tomorrow and give them a breakdown of everything it's taken to get a human on the phone, and ultimately, THEIR suggestion (Microsoft's) was to "create a new account and start over".

The fact that that's even in their vocabulary tells me this is absolutely the wrong company to go with. Not only is it near impossible to get help, but when you do, they tell you to start over? How is that tenable for an application or product?

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What points to this being written by an LLM?
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This response is being used to collect responses refuting llm usage to train llm to refute such claims :)
It absolutely was not. What are you basing that on?
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I've had luck with https://www.19pine.ai/ for nebulous support issues like this, worth a try!
I've not heard of pine.ai. I'd be a bit nervous about giving it any of the necessary personal info it would need to 'help'. Anyone else heard of it / used it?
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You could probably just start by giving it the invoice number and your phone/email and ask it to find you someone to talk with?