Azure Openai Student account costs money

Question

I woke up to find that my credit card failed to pay azure $1000 I am so confused, I am a student from high school, my teacher told me to try azure for the project, and I followed this link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1330948/how-to-use-the-azure-openai-services-for-students on creating my account. But I thought student accounts are free, I'm so confused, please help. Thank you so much.

Answer 1

I'm presuming you're 18+ years old and attending an accredited, degree-granting two-year or four-year educational institution wherein you're a full-time student. These are the pre-requisites to be eligible for the "Azure for Students" offer as defined explicitly in our page - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/offers/ms-azr-0170p/

There are a couple of things here.

1. You must sign up with your university or school email to sign up for this.
2. You get only $100 of Azure credit plus a whole bunch of free services and these could vary between being fully free to being free up to a certain monthly quota and within the 12 month window for new sign-ups only.
3. Once you utilize the $100 credit, you'll get an email notification asking you to upgrade to PAYG model if you want to continue getting the free monthly amounts of popular services. If you choose not to upgrade, your subscription and products will be disabled.
4. While some of the AI services are free within the defined quotas, Azure OpenAI isn't on that list. So, effectively you're burning through your $100 credits right from the start.

All these points are called out in our page - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/students#tabx84633d61a3bc4609a9272bac50fc36cc

In general, I would strongly recommend you to keep a tab on your costs by leveraging built-in services like Azure Cost Management so that you don't end up with surprise on your Azure bills.

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