I've had a Microsoft 365 developer subscription that I've been keeping active for a while, but the last month or so I've been unable to. Now I've started using it again but I'm getting this message in my dashboard:
This subscription is inactive and will expire soon Please take advantage of your free trial subscription to develop solutions for Microsoft 365. If you don't start using this subscription for development, non-admin users will lose access on Jan 10, 2024. Your subscription will be deleted on Jan 29, 2024.
I've been using it for dev work, even tried various methods online (creating Teams and publishing PowerApps etc. - I even have my GitHub account connected and have been active there too). But this message persists, and the days keep counting down, now at 3/120 days remaining.
Unless I'm misunderstanding this message, the sub is not yet deactivated, right? So, what more can I do to prevent it from expiring? It hasn't been more than 3 months since the latest renewal, it's not like I've been inactive for so long.
I tried contacting Microsoft support, they replied, looked into my issue, and told me to post here and in other forums (??). So I'm kinda at a loss on what to do in order to not lose the sub.
Any help is appreciated.
Edit/Update:
Seeing that there's a lot of views of this and 2 upvotes, guess I'll answer my own question since there were no other replies and someone else might have the same issue:
What I had to do was to contact support from inside my dev sub's fake org's admin center, and not from the "dev dashboard". There's a support button in the lower right corner, you get to go through an automated system for a short while but then you get the option to send a message to their human support center.
I thought it was only for paying customers from, you know, real paying orgs, but apparently it's for lowly devs with free fake sub orgs too? Or maybe they just pitied me, idk, but I got the full support experience in any case, they even called a couple times to get more info quicker.
Initially they renewed my sub manually for 30 more days, but unfortunately after around 20 days it started showing the same inactivity warning. I contacted them again, and this time they told me to just continue using the sub and it'll auto-renew regardless, which it did about a week before the initial 30 days expired. It was renewed for 55 days though, and I'm not sure why not for 90 as is the normal amount, but I guess it might take a few "cycles" to sync? In any case, they insisted that it'll keep auto-renewing, so I'll just wait and see.
Pro-tip
Don't be like me, check and do change the default reply e-mail address in your initial support request form to one that you'll actually be monitoring for replies. The default in my case was from a fake admin inside the fake org so I left it there, somehow thinking they'd figure out my real e-mail (the one I used to create the sub in the first place). Well, they didn't. But after trying to reach me in an unmonitored e-mail for a few days in vain, they ended up calling me, so cudos to them for not simply giving up and closing the ticket.