Let us pause and enjoy this moment of profound, digital humiliation of myself. I got it all wrong, the GitHub Copilot announcement. Yes, I should probably be tarred and feathered, or at the very least, stand in the drizzle on a gray marketplace in Pyongyang, awaiting the punishment announced by a committee of tiny North Korean claqueurs in badly-tailored, always too-big uniforms, whose pins and medals add nothing to their character but meaningless weight.
They have all reason to. Because, apparently, not only LLMs hallucinate – I do, too.
Mail From San Francisco
Two days ago, I suggested GitHub had fired the Copilot. In reality, they just moved him to First Class and locked the door to the Student Lounge. I misread GitHub’s recent email regarding GitHub Copilot and the Student Plan, and, thereby, probably invented some things that are simply not true. I’m human; yeah, go ahead, insult me. Oh, wait, you can’t, the comments are off.
So, that said, let’s start again, with the weary precision of a watchmaker cleaning a timepiece that has already stopped ticking. My watch stopped ticking at exactly 01:22, March 12, 2026 GMT+7, which is around March 13, 23:30 here. By now, every GitHub user clinging to the wreckage of a Student Plan must have received and read the email. If you haven’t, GitHub seems to have lost a bet and was bold enough to open a public discussion page featuring the exact content of this digital eviction notice.
The page itself feels more like a digital Wailing Wall where students from every corner of the globe gather to share “anecdotes.” These are the stories of young men and women in developing nations who suddenly realize that the ladder they were climbing has had the top ten rungs removed by a guy in a fleece vest sitting in San Francisco, after he took the first sip of his “Venti” Starbucks coffee, extra-hot, sugar-free vanilla, oat milk latte with light foam and a drizzle of caramel, custom-ordered via an app that tracked his carbon footprint.
It is a tragic, slow-motion car crash of expectations for every Student Plan member, and GitHub is watching it from the sidewalk with the detached, glassy-eyed interest of a fashion model looking at a dead pigeon. I assume you’ve read it. If you haven’t, don’t bother; it’s just a lot of people realizing that “free” was always a temporary lease on a treadmill. Some users even threatened to switch to Zed.
GitHub Copilot Pro ≠ GitHub Pro
The primary source of my previous “hallucination” was the misunderstanding of this scary (I’m a student myself!) email. I was still under the impression that GitHub Pro and GitHub Copilot bound together: you verify as a student and get both GitHub Pro, and then you can enable GitHub Copilot Pro. Just like the years before.
Well, I was wrong. I was probably too fixated on GitHub’s corporate Fata Morgana that the “commitment to providing free access to GitHub Copilot for verified students is not changing.” But a mirage is a mirage, and if you factor in that Microsoft has the reins on what happens to its swallowed companies, it won’t take long to figure out that this business model, which carried over 2,000,000 “students”, was doomed.
What is changing is how Copilot is packaged and managed for students. What this means for you Starting today, March 12, 2026, your Copilot access will be managed under a new GitHub Copilot Student plan, alongside your existing GitHub Education benefits
So, the Student Plan was “repackaged,” as they called it in the boring corporate bullshit term that can only come from middle management. This left students almost on the same level as – ewww! – free users, this uneducated scum! Those who probably think a club sandwich is the height of culinary achievement and that “innovation” is something that happens at a TED talk.
Student as a Service
Anyway, under this new Student Plan, you still have access to the, in my opinion, pretty generous GitHub Student Developer Pack, which offers some really neat things, e.g., a JetBrains license or free domains you’ll never use. But GitHub Copilot Pro? Ripped out of the offer like the free bag of salted peanuts on a domestic flight you haven’t even finished eating. In words:
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.
The new “GitHub Copilot Student” plan is a version that isn’t listed anywhere on the glossy pricing pages. It is a phantom plan, a ghost in the machine featuring surgically precise restrictions:
- No selection of models. You get what you’re given
- Premium models, such as Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Opus 4.6, or GPT-4.5, can’t be selected anymore
- The new “Auto” mode is now your new god. It’s the AI equivalent of being fed whatever is left in the fridge at the end of the week, spoiled or not
And then I made fun of paying users who kept saying, “Just pay through $10 bucks, man.” Fun, because I misunderstood that the GitHub Copilot Pro plan was not the Copilot Phantom offered to students. It was a genuine Pro plan, with selectable models and all, just a new one.
But I wasn’t completely wrong, though. At least not on the first day. Until recently, it wasn’t possible to upgrade to Pro or even Pro+ if you were on a Student Plan. Why? Don’t ask me. Anyway, this, shortly after the shit storm reached GitHub from all sides, was changed:
Pay Up or Get The GPT-4.1 Off!
So, our highly educated, Mensa-accredited, simultaneous chess-playing students from Lahore and Peshawar now have at least the option to pay up. They – and that includes me, who dares to be white and hiding in a tropical country from the world – can now “upgrade” back to the Pro tier for $10. The multipliers – mostly in the 0.33x and 1x range – are enough for many. Unless you opt for the Claude Opus (Fast), whose multiplier of 33x can only be the result of a disgruntled GitHub employee. No sane person would burn through their monthly budget with 9 (!) requests.
In the end, all that’s changed is: $10. Living in a tropical country where a Honda Wave, where the decision to add two, three extra passengers on the bike is totally fine, I know that $10 is not $10 everywhere. And, in my opinion, GitHub should’ve taken this into account (see the sob stories on the Wailing Wall).
In Germany, I can get a mega pint of beer, good beer, and a hot Currywurst for probably less than $10. Here in Thailand, ~320 baht might be just enough for a poor family to keep their bellies full through the week.
But that’s a whole different can of worms. I prefer Currywurst.
