At the time of this writing, I’m sure everyone who uses GitHub Copilot has heard the news: Copilot is dead. Well, not exactly, but to many, it feels this way. GitHub just moved your literal copilot to the first-class cabin and locked the door. Students and Pro users are left in coach with an “Auto” mode that selects the cheapest model possible while pretending everything is fine. The era of affordable high-altitude coding has ended.
The E-Mail from Nowhere
Out of the blue, on March 12, 2026, at 23:25, I received an email from [email protected]. The announcement wasn’t long, but it felt like the end of the unbeatable Student Plan that lets you use all Premium models and gives you 300 Premium requests, not diffuse tokens, for free, per month.
Yep, that was the deal before this email. Every request to any model was counted as a single request. Only the multiplier – the 1x for most models, the 0.33x for smaller models like Haiku, and the absolutely absurd 30x for Claude Opus 4.6 (Fast Mode) – decides over how much the “price” you as a student with $10 off has left.
Students received the “Pro” plan for free, which usually costs $10. It comes with 300 free premium requests. Every further request can be topped up by uploading a budget; price: $0.04. That means that another 300 tokens could be bought for $12 in case the user was running out of requests. No limits, no nerfing, no nothing. Just brilliant, state-of-the-art top-tier models one got far too cozy with.
The New Deal
Since that email, this model is no longer available, and it took only minutes for the GitHub Copilot subreddit to be in pure rage. Rightly so, if you look at the new terms.
According to them, the new Student Plan looks like this:
- A student will no longer receive Copilot Plus ($10)
- AI benefits are separated from other student benefits
- GitHub Pro users are no longer able to pick your model
Yes, you heard right. GitLab has basically butchered the Student Plan that I and many others were using, since we’re all students, right?
And in that ironic remark lies perhaps the reason: Student Plans were openly available on the dark web, or at least the credentials that get you through it. I noticed that the security was increased when I applied for my second year of the plan, because, you know, I was still studying, in a way.
GitHub states in its email that they have accumulated over 2,000,000 users over time. That’s 2 million, for those who find the number confusing. And 2 million users that didn’t come for the “Major League Hacking (MLH) and Hack Club to support student hackathons and youth-led coding communities,” the email praised itself with. They came for free Copilot Plus, and only for that.
Captain without a Copilot
Behind the corporate rhetoric, it was clear that the Student Plan is now a thing of the past. I say that even though the email explicitly stated:
Our commitment to providing free access to GitHub Copilot for verified students is not changing1
Which sounds like a sentence for Students Plan users to exhale. Until they read the following sentence:
What is changing is how Copilot is packaged and managed for students. What this means for you2 Starting today, March 12, 2026, your Copilot access will be managed under a new GitHub Copilot Student3 plan, alongside your existing GitHub Education benefits
They tried to make it sound as smooth as possible, but the harsh reality is: they just pulled the carpet out from under every student’s feet. So, while “[the] GitHub Copilot for verified students is not changing,” they simply changed the plan’s benefits as listed above.
And then, the ultimate destruction of the Student Plan:
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.
Go GPT-4.1 yourself!
That means: GPT-5.4: gone. Claude Sonnet: gone. Claude Opus: gone. And if that’s not enough, they introduced an “Auto” mode that will reroute your request to the very best (read: cheapest) model for your task, which could be, in theory, one of the ones named. But who are we shitting here?
The email even acknowledged that by admitting “[w]e know this will be disappointing” and seriously tried to frame it as something good for the future of Copilot. Reddit, however, was less enthusiastic.
In many posts, people who bought GHCP Pro with their hard-earned dollars saw this hysteria as unnecessary, even annoying at some point. Their argument was to just buckle up and pay the $10 bucks. If that were so easy, many probably would have done that by now. However, the smart ones have already figured out that a user on a Student Plan can’t simply upgrade to a GitHub Copilot Pro plan without losing their benefits. As I said, these two things – Copilot and student benefits – were separated.
Thousands of comments on the discussions site on GitHub later, GitHub committed to one small change:
Update March 13: 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.
Very generous. Very Microsoft. As a commentator wrote: “It’s Microsoft. They ruin everything they touch.”
Copilot Pro has changed, too
But there’s another problem: The paid Pro plan has also been nerfed. Looking at the plans side by side, we read the following benefits for Copilot Pro:
- Copilot coding agent
- Copilot code review
- Claude and Codex on GitHub and VS Code
- 300 premium requests to use latest models, with the option to buy more1
- Unlimited agent mode and chats with GPT-5 mini2
- Unlimited inline suggestions
- Access to models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and more
Did you see it? Me neither. There’s no mention of being able to use all existing models. Instead, Pro users can use “use latest models” and have access to “Access to models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and more”.
The Pro+ plan, the highest one can buy, says it clearly, though:
Access to all models, including Claude Opus 4.6 and more
In plain English, this means that the Pro plan still has student benefits and still has access to some models, while Pro+ gives you, in terms of models, what you were getting before via a Pro account, student or no student.
And now, put that $39.99 per month on your damn credit card, please, or you’re refactoring your entire codebase with GPT-4.1!