You don’t get what you don’t pay for! Microsoft’s GitHub is dialing back on expenses by removing several costly premium models from its free GitHub Copilot Student plan.
On Wednesday, Martin Woodward, GitHub VP of developer relations, soured relations with the site’s student developer community by breaking the unwelcome news.
Characterizing the plan change as an effort to make student access sustainable, Woodward said that, starting Thursday, March 12, complimentary access to Copilot will be managed under a new GitHub Student Plan alongside other GitHub Education benefits.
“As part of this transition, however, some premium models, including GPT-5.4, and Claude Opus and Sonnet models, will no longer be available for self-selection under the GitHub Copilot Student Plan,” he explained in a discussion forum post. “We know this will be disappointing, but we’re making this change so we can keep Copilot free and accessible for millions of students around the world.”
The student plan still has access to many models including Claude 4.5 Haiku (normal price = Input $1 / 1M tokens; Output $5 / 1M tokens for output), Gemini 3.1 Pro (Input $2 / 1M; Output $12 / 1M), and GPT-5.3 Codex (Input $1.75 / 1M; Output $14 / 1M).
But costlier top performers like GPT 5.4 (Input $2.50 / 1M; Output $15.00 / 1M), Sonnet 4.6 (Input $3 / 1M; Output $15 / 1M), and Opus 4.6 (Input $5 / 1M; Output $25 / 1M) are no longer part of the mix.
OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
GitHub’s decision has aroused ire. Woodward’s post had garnered just 21 up votes compared to 2,874 down votes at the time this article was filed, as well as more than a thousand comments in the past two days.
Most of the comments express disappointment, citing the educational benefits of having access to models that perform particularly well.
A forum participant posting under the name Sahad Rushdi remarked: “For many of us working on advanced engineering projects, Claude 4.6 Sonnet and Opus are not just ‘options’ – they are currently the most capable AI agents for coding, logic, and handling large-scale refactoring. Restricting these models from self-selection limits our ability to learn with the industry’s leading technology.”
That sentiment was echoed by an individual posting under the name Nguyễn Thế Toàn: “[T]he removal of premium models such as GPT-5.4, Claude Opus, and Claude Sonnet makes learning programming more difficult. These models are much better at explaining complex coding concepts, helping debug problems, and guiding students step by step when we are stuck.”
In response to the many calls to restore high-end model access, Woodward on Thursday offered a suggestion: Pay.
“We’ve now added the option so folks can upgrade from your GitHub Copilot Student plan to a paid GitHub Copilot Pro or GitHub Copilot Pro+ plan if you want to, while retaining the rest of your GitHub Student Pack benefits,” he said in an update to his initial post.
That’s exactly what Copilot users have been trying to avoid, and not just students. Only 3.3 percent of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 customers who bother with Copilot Chat actually pay anything for the service. One of the growing concerns for Microsoft investors is whether the company’s capex spending on infrastructure to support AI workloads will pay off. ®