[janpieterz]

Hi,

I'm not affiliated with Microsoft, but you can sign up for a free trial [1]. They'll give you 150 euro in credits for a month to play around with. Besides that, a lot of their services are available very cheaply to play around with, for example table storage and blob storage, Azure websites, would hardly cost you anything or you can even use it for free if you hardly have any data/usage to get to know the system. There are of course things that will cost you, but if you're just willing to play around, for 50 euro a month investment yourself you can get quite far.

What Microsoft also offers is Bizspark [2], which if it is applicable, will help you along the way nicely.

I fully agree that the Amazon credits is setup a little bit nicer to just play with, but with that first month (if you dedicate some time for it) you should get a good feel of it, plus the opportunity for Bizspark helps a lot, and if you don't fit in the Bizspark requirements I think it's more than reasonable to assume you can pay 50 euros a month to test it for a longer period than a month!

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/default.aspx

[2] http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/free-trial/