[Someone1234]

I think BizSpark is wonderful but let's be honest here there are tons of technological strings attached, just no contractual ones...

- Azure credits: Get you tied in/used to/familiar with the platform and services. Sure, you can use just Linux VMs, but Microsoft pushes their integration services pretty heavily.

- Free SQL Server, Windows Server, and Visual Studio. Any of which you use in anger, you're now somewhat tied into those respective platforms.

- Office 365: Just more generic Office-washing, so the assumption continues to be that Outlook/Word/Excel are the only offerings in the space.

Microsoft are just more subtle about it. That's their style. Kind of like giving every school hugely discounted Office products, it might seem altruistic, but really it is to hook them into the Microsoft-way early.

[mark_l_watson]

There aren't very many strings. I am a year into the BizSpark program. So far, I have only been using a small VPS, always on, for the product I am working on - so I am not taking as much advantage as I could. Azure is very nice, comparable to AWS and Google Cloud