azd up still fails on free subscriptions after fix #8537 — is OpenAI.S0.AccountCount limit=1 the blocker?

[Prachig-Microsoft]

Problem

After upgrading to azd 1.25.5 (which includes the fix from PR #8537 (https://github.com/microsoft/customer-chatbot-solution-accelerator/issues/8537) for #8533 (https://github.com/microsoft/customer-chatbot-solution-accelerator/issues/8533)), azd up still fails on free Azure subscriptions with the same quota error when deploying templates with @metadata usageName.

Error

ERROR: prompting for value: getting locations with quota: no location found with enough quota for
OpenAI.GlobalStandard.gpt4.1-mini ( Cap: 1 ) and OpenAI.GlobalStandard.gpt-realtime-mini ( Cap: 1 )

Environment

• azd version: 1.25.5 (stable)
• Subscription type: Azure Free (Pay-As-You-Go not enabled)
• Subscription ID: 6becd867-e9d1-4ed9-a7a7-5bf1260XXXXX
• Template: customer-chatbot-solution-accelerator (https://github.com/microsoft/customer-chatbot-solution-accelerator/)

What we observed

We ran azd up --debug and noticed the /usages API is no longer returning empty — it returns 200 OK with 212 items of real quota data. So the empty-response fix from #8537 (https://github.com/microsoft/customer-chatbot-solution-accelerator/issues/8537) is not the code path being hit.

We then called the API directly to check model quota:

$token = azd auth token --scope https://management.azure.com/.default
$headers = @{Authorization="Bearer $token"}
$response = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "https://management.azure.com/subscriptions/{subId}/providers/Microsoft.CognitiveServices/locations/eastus2/usages?api-version=2025-06-01" -Headers $headers
$response.value | Where-Object { $.name.value -like "gpt" -or $.name.value -eq "OpenAI.S0.AccountCount" }

Results:

• OpenAI.GlobalStandard.gpt4.1-mini → Limit: 5000, Current: 100, Remaining: 4900
• OpenAI.GlobalStandard.gpt-realtime-mini → Limit: 20, Current: 2, Remaining: 18
• OpenAI.S0.AccountCount → Limit: 1, Current: 0, Remaining: 1

Model quota is clearly sufficient. However, we noticed that OpenAI.S0.AccountCount has a limit of only 1 on this free subscription (same across all regions — eastus2, francecentral, swedencentral).

Question

We see in prompt.go (https://github.com/Azure/azure-dev/blob/main/cli/azd/pkg/infra/provisioning/bicep/prompt.go) that locationsWithQuotaFor() injects a hardcoded requirement:

requirements := []ai.QuotaRequirement{
{UsageName: "OpenAI.S0.AccountCount", MinCapacity: 2},
}

Is this MinCapacity: 2 the reason free subscriptions are being rejected? Since the API reports OpenAI.S0.AccountCount remaining=1 and the code requires 2, every location would fail the check — even though the actual model quota is more than enough.

How can free-tier users verify this is their blocker? We couldn't find OpenAI.S0.AccountCount in the Azure Portal Quotas page . The only way we found to check is via the REST API call above.

Should MinCapacity be reduced to 1? Our deployment only creates 1 AI Services account and succeeds when we remove the usageName metadata (bypassing the quota check entirely).

Workaround

Commenting out the usageName array from the @metadata block bypasses the quota pre-check and deployment succeeds:

Before (fails):

@metadata({
azd:{
type: 'location'
usageName: [
'OpenAI.GlobalStandard.gpt4.1-mini,50'
'OpenAI.GlobalStandard.gpt-realtime-mini,1'
]
}
})

After (works — deployment completes successfully):

@metadata({
azd:{
type: 'location'
// usageName: [
// 'OpenAI.GlobalStandard.gpt4.1-mini,50'
// 'OpenAI.GlobalStandard.gpt-realtime-mini,1'
// ]
}
})

This confirms the model quota is actually available and only the azd pre-check is blocking the deployment.

Related

• Original issue: The @metadata decorators in main.bicep prevent deployment on free Azure subscriptions #8533 (https://github.com/microsoft/customer-chatbot-solution-accelerator/issues/8533)
• Fix PR: fix: treat empty AI quota usages as available instead of rejecting #8537 (https://github.com/microsoft/customer-chatbot-solution-accelerator/issues/8537)