Sideloading from starter template does nothing

[Fuzzyma]

Provide required information needed to triage your issue

Your Environment

• Platform [PC desktop, Mac, iOS, Office on the web]: Desktop / Windows
• Host [Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.]: Outlook Classic
• Office version number: 16_0_18324_20194-20250131T18440101
• Operating System: Win 10
• Browser (if using Office on the web): ______

Expected behavior

Running npm run start should sideload the addin

Current behavior

The addin is not visible anywhere

Steps to reproduce

1. npm run start
2. Login with a company account (can anyone explain why I cant use my personal account here?)
3. Outlook opens but no addin is visible

Context

How does the account play into this? I am a sole developer and dont have my own company account (I reused one from somewhen).
Can the account policy stop my addin from showing up? Why do I need a company account in the first place?

Useful logs

• Console errors
• Screenshots
• Test file (if only happens on a particular file)

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[github-actions]

Here are some similar issues that might help you. Please check if they can solve your problem.

• Sideloading in "classic" Outlook broken #5143

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Possible solution (Extracted from existing issue, might be incorrect; please verify carefully)

The issue resolved itself without any specific action. This suggests that the problem might be intermittent or related to external factors such as server-side changes. If you encounter this issue, it might be worth waiting and trying again later.

Reference:

• Sideloading in "classic" Outlook broken #5143 (comment)

[millerds]

Can you provide more specifics about what kind of project you are creating? Depending what kind of add-in elements, you are working with you will have to use different parts of Outlook to see the behavior.

As far at logging in goes . . . Outlook add-in have always required an account in order to sideload the manifest because the add-in is stored on the email server (exchange). The tooling script themselves do not handle accounts. For a while sideloading was done using the Outlook client itself which would have to have email account already set up. In the past couple of years, we've been transitioning to a direct add-in service that works across the different M365 apps (and allows the use of json for manifests instead of XML) and the service is connected to a tenant . . . thus the login prompt for that.

Microsoft does provide dev tenants for office add-in development . . . but you can also disable this new service connection by going to File => Options => Advanced and unchecking the "Show Apps in Outlook" which will revert the UI back to the existing exchange based sideloading (note, this doesn't affect the dev tools sideloading - 'npm run start' - but does let you manually sideload an xml manifest).

[Fuzzyma]

A bit of context: I am a freelancer and usually dont use office products. So for a project I was tasked to create an addin. Therefore I created a dev environment. However, the cli wants me to login to a business account (which I dont have).
Getting dev accounts from microsoft is discontinued if you dont happen to have a subscription to Visual Studio.

I guess I have 2 questions:

• can the admin of a business account disable addins so that I dont see them on sideload or manual load? That would explain that I didnt see anything when I tried using an older clients business account
• is there a chance getting a dev account without paying? Shouldnt microsoft have an interest in making it easy to develop for their platform?