Thank you to everyone who has signed so far.

A critical update: after posting this case on Reddit's r/AZURE, most replies argued "read the terms, it's your fault." We now have proof that shuts that argument down.

On December 2, 2025, Sridhar M — a Microsoft External Staff member and Moderator with 3,895 reputation points — officially answered on Microsoft's own Q&A platform that startup credits DO apply to Claude usage on Azure AI Foundry:

"Startup credits (Azure Sponsorship) apply to these charges until the credit balance is exhausted."

He was wrong. Founders who trusted this guidance got charged.

Archived proof: https://web.archive.org/web/20260112075754/https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5642942/do-you-know-the-price-of-claude-opus-4-5

When Microsoft's own badged staff cannot correctly identify which models are covered by startup credits, "read the docs" is no longer a valid defense.

We also received a new case from an engineer at EPAM Systems — over $3,000 charged with $10K in credits sitting unused. Their entire team subscription was deleted as a result, blocking colleagues from running POCs. The damage goes far beyond money.

Please keep sharing this petition. The more signatures we collect across multiple countries, the harder it becomes for Microsoft to ignore.

Full documentation: https://zenn.dev/leach/articles/a8a71f886ec6aa
Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/AZURE/comments/1rqw9pn/