Azure DevOps pricing can feel a bit confusing, but the pricing model is surprisingly easy to understand and the Azure DevOps is actually very cheap to use compared to another CI/CD systems. Pricing is based on the number of users and the extra services that are bought. First five (5) users are FREE. After that every new user costs 5.06€ per month, unless you are adding stakeholder OR invited the user that has active Visual Studio Subscription. First let’s talk about stakeholder licenses.
Stakeholder is a free license that has restricted access to DevOps features. Stakeholders can create and edit work items (including bugs) and of course view backlog and sprint boards. They cannot run builds or view pull requests. You can think them as a manager accounts that doesn’t have access to code or CI/CD features, but can add work items into backlog and view the sprint state. Stakeholder users are added through Organization settings > Users.
Usually the developers that work with Microsoft technologies have the Visual Studio Subscription, because it gives them an access to newest tools like latest version of Visual Studio. All the users with Visual Studio Subscription are free of charge. Even if you invite them from outside of your organization, the developers can “bring” their Visual Studio Subscription licenses into your DevOps organization and they don’t cost you a dime.
You can check your subscription status from https://visualstudio.microsoft.com.
Azure DevOps provides lots of features with the cost of user licenses, like one free hosted build agent and one free self-hosted agent license. 2 GiB of free Azure artifact space and so on. However these are not enough for larger organizations and you may have to buy things like more build agents and artifact space.
Extra Services
On top of the user licenses you may need to buy more build agents that are used for deployments and builds. Azure DevOps organization comes with one free build agent, but it is limited into 1800 minutes a month (and of course one parallel build, because there is only one agent). For small projects that is usually more than enough, but if you are hosting multiple or bigger projects in Azure DevOps you will run out of build time. Luckily buying extra agent is easy and quite cheap.
One hosted build agent costs 33.74€/month and it has unlimited build time. The pricing is linear so if you need 10 parallel builds, the cost is 337.4€/month. That is actually quite cheap price for a hosted build agent that is waiting for your builds 247.
Azure artifacts is feature that can be used to store Nuget or NPM packages. The first two gigabytes is free, but extra gigabytes costs from one euro to two euros a month. Azure artifacts is not required for build artifacts. Only for packages are that exposed to other users or open sourced into services like nuget.org.
The last extra cost that Azure DevOps has is the Test Plans license. By default the Basic licenses (that costs 5.06€/month) does not have access of the test tools (manual test tools) and you need to pay extra 43.86€ per user per month to get access of those tools. Tests Plans are not mandatory and I find that most of the Azure DevOps organizations don’t use them actually.
Example calculation
Finally lets see an example of Azure DevOps pricing. Let’s imagine that we have a software company that has 40 employees. We want to invite our 20 developers, 5 external developers and 5 managers into Azure DevOps. That makes total of 30 people. Our internal developers have Visual Studio Subscriptions, so they don’t need basic Azure DevOps license. 5 managers that we want to invite can use stakeholder licenses, so they are also free of charge. The external company developers that we are using does not have Visual Studio Subscriptions, so we have to buy them 5 basic licenses. That is total of 25.3€/month. With total of 25 developers we aren’t the smallest company in the block and we want to ensure that our build queue times are short and build runs immediately when the developer submits code into Azure DevOps free GIT version control. We will buy four hosted agent to support the team. That makes total of 134.928€/month. We don’t have big nugget packages that we are publishing, so the free 2 gigabytes of Azure Artifact storage is enough for us.
Total cost of Azure DevOps with 30 users and 4 hosted build agents is 25.3€ + 134.928€ = 160,228€/month.