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You could run a tiny VM for AD ($30/mo) in Azure and use a site to site basic SKU ($26/mo) to connect them. It would probably be half the cost of the AD DS at $115/mo. The major downside is now you'd have to run dirsynced accounts with AD as the root, which completely changes the management vs AD DS allows AzureAD to be the root as you're looking for. The only other alternative approach I've seen is something like this LDAP wrapper project: https://github.com/ahaenggli/AzureAD-LDAP-wrapper. I have not tested it yet, and it's less secure. Here's my two cents, if you have a limited group of users where the $115/mo is too expensive, use local accounts. If it's a more significant user group, eat the $115/mo, it's necessary.