What happens when an admin removes my subscription?

  • Article

If your Visual Studio subscription was assigned to you by an admin in your work or school organization, they might remove it at some point. Reasons can include changes to job roles or to your organization's purchase plans. This article outlines what you can expect if an admin removes your subscription.

Tip

If your admin removes your subscription, they might be planning to issue you a different subscription. If you receive a notification that your subscription has been removed, you might wish to reach out to your admin to see if another subscription is available. Visit the subscription portal and select the Contact my admin button in the top right.

How do my benefits change?

The changes you see for a specific benefit depends on the benefit itself. This article looks at some examples, and discusses steps you need to take to make sure you have access to things like your Azure assets.

Visual Studio IDE

The license for the Visual Studio IDE is dependent on a subscription being assigned to you. If your subscription is removed, you lose access to any version of the IDE provided in a paid subscription. If you still need Visual Studio, consider installing the free version: Visual Studio Code.

Individual Azure credits

When your subscription is removed, you no longer accrue individual Azure credits. The credits you accrue remain available for 30 days. After that time, your assets are no longer be available.

To avoid losing your assets, make sure to take one of the following steps if your subscription is removed:

  • Convert the subscription to pay-as-you-go. For details, visit our Azure DevTest Pay-As-You-Go subscriptions page. You need to attach a payment instrument such as a credit card to this subscription.

  • Move your assets to another Azure subscription if one is available to you. For example, if you have an Azure subscription as part of a different Visual Studio subscription. Instructions for moving resources to a new subscription are included in Azure's documentation.

    Important

    It's important that you move your Azure assets to another Azure subscription or change the existing Azure subscription to pay-as-you-go to avoid loss of your existing Azure assets.

Software downloads and product keys

Access to software downloads and product keys from within the subscriptions portal is lost.

Azure DevOps

Access to Azure DevOps requires a license and is lost.

Other benefits

The effects of having a subscription removed vary.

  • Benefits with a fixed length

    Many of the benefits provided by our partners are offers that have a fixed length. If you activated them before the removal of your subscription, many of them are unaffected and remain available to you until the end of their normal term. If you've been accessing those benefits through the subscription portal, you need to access them directly on the partner site. For example, let's say you received a Pluralsight subscription as part of a Visual Studio subscription. When your Visual Studio subscription is removed, you still have any remaining time on the training subscription, but you need to sign in to Pluralsight's website directly.

  • Benefits that require sign-in for each use are no longer available.

  • Upon removal of your subscription, you lose the ability to activate any more benefits.

Visual Studio subscription assignments deleted by Microsoft

If you're a subscriptions admin, you might occasionally see in your dashboard that Microsoft removed a subscription. The reason says that the account is closed.

Why an account might be removed

  • Subscribers request closure of their Microsoft accounts. If a subscriber requests closure of a Microsoft account (MSA), subscriptions associated with that MSA are removed. For more information including important things to consider before closing an account, see How to close your Microsoft account.
  • Subscribers are removed from Microsoft Entra tenant. Subscriptions can automatically assign subscriptions through a Microsoft Entra group. When they're removed from the group, their subscriptions are removed.

What happens when the account is closed?

If the subscription is removed, the subscriber loses access to the subscription. If a subscriber is removed from a Microsoft Entra group, their subscription information is permanently removed within 180 days. If a subscriber closes their MSA, their information is removed immediately.

Anonymization of Visual Studio subscriber information

When an event occurs that blocks a subscriber's use of a subscription, the user's personal information such as name and sign-in account is scrambled to render it unusable. This "anonymization" is done to safeguard the subscriber's personal information. These events can include:

  • Expiration of the subscription
  • Deletion of the subscribers sign-in account

Note

This article provides steps for how to delete personal data from the device or service, and can be used to support your obligations under the GDPR. If you’re looking for general info about GDPR, see the GDPR section of the Service Trust Portal.

When does anonymization occur?

Events that make a subscription unusable to a subscriber triggers anonymization. How quickly the anonymization occurs depends on the type of subscription and the triggering event.

Subscription Type Event triggering anonymization When anonymization occurs
Visual Studio Dev Essentials Subscriber opts out of the program or doesn't accept the terms of use 30 days
Visual Studio subscriptions purchased through the Microsoft Store (retail) Subscription expires or isn't activated 360 days
Visual Studio subscriptions acquired through Volume License, Visual Studio Marketplace (cloud subscriptions), or programs such as Microsoft Cloud Partner Network Subscription expires or isn't assigned to a user 180 days
All subscriptions A Microsoft Entra account or Microsoft Account (MSA) used to sign into the subscription is closed Immediately
All subscriptions A subscriber is removed from the tenant that is associated with the Microsoft Entra account Immediately

Support resources

See also

Next steps