Azure for Students

LLM 8.8/10 Jul 4, 2026

Full-time university students get $100 in Azure credit yearly (renewable) with no credit card, usable on Azure OpenAI and 1,700+ Foundry models.

Free credit: $100
Credit window: 365 days
Card required: No

Azure for Students scores 8.8/10 for free value in LLM. The main constraint: $100 Azure credit valid 12 months, renewable annually while a student; no credit card. Plus free monthly tiers of 65+ always-free services.

Category LLM Kind Student cloud + LLM credit Caveats Eligibility gated to verified full-time university students (school email). $100 credit is finite; Azure OpenAI usage draws it down quickly. Renewal annual Card required No Eligibility students, approval required

Free value score

8.8 / 10

Show the math

Value 9/10

value = 100 $ one-time

weighted score = 0.7 * 9/10

Model Quality 9.8/10

value = 55 artificial_analysis_score

weighted score = 0.2 * 9.8/10

Volume 4.9/10

value = 8888889 tok/mo

weighted score = 0.1 * 4.9/10

Access 4/10

value = 4/10

score = 4/10

Key metrics

GPT-5.5 (gpt-5.5) 55 Best model

$100 Credit

No Commercial use education/noncom

Models

0 free · 1900+ total

Limits may be stale — last re-verified outside this section's freshness window.

Model	Family	AA	Access
GPT-5.5 (gpt-5.5)	GPT	54.8	paid
GPT-5.4 (gpt-5.4)	GPT	51.4	paid
GPT-5.3-codex	GPT	44.3	paid
GPT-5.2 (gpt-5.2)	GPT	42.2	paid
GPT-5.2-codex	GPT	40.1	paid
GPT-5.4-mini	GPT	40	paid
GPT-5.1 (gpt-5.1)	GPT	38.9	paid
GPT-5.4-nano	GPT	38.2	paid
GPT-5.1-codex-max	GPT	34.7	paid
o3 (o3)	GPT	30.4	paid
gpt-oss-120b	GPT	23.8	paid
o1	GPT	23.4	paid
DeepSeek-R1	DeepSeek	20.1	paid
GPT-4.1 (gpt-4.1)	GPT	19.4	paid
o3-mini	GPT	19	paid
GPT-4.1-mini	GPT	16.3	paid
gpt-oss-20b	GPT	14.9	paid
Llama 4 Maverick 17B-128E	Llama	14.3	paid
Mistral Large / Mistral Medium 3	Mistral	12.5	paid
GPT-4o (gpt-4o)	GPT	11.2	paid
GPT-4.1-nano	GPT	7.3	paid
GPT-4o mini	GPT	6.9	paid
Claude Opus 4.x (Anthropic)	Claude	—	paid
Claude Sonnet 4.x (Anthropic)	Claude	—	paid
Cohere Command R+ / Embed v3	Cohere	—	paid
DeepSeek-V3.x	DeepSeek	—	paid
GPT-5 (gpt-5)	GPT	—	paid
GPT-5-codex	GPT	—	paid
GPT-5-mini	GPT	—	paid
GPT-5-nano	GPT	—	paid
GPT-5-pro	GPT	—	paid
GPT-5.4-pro	GPT	—	paid
gpt-image-1.5 / gpt-image-2	GPT	—	paid
Grok 3 / Grok-3-mini (xAI)	Grok	—	paid
Grok 4 (xAI)	Grok	—	paid
Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct	Llama	—	paid
Ministral-3B	Mistral	—	paid
o4-mini	GPT	—	paid
Qwen-32B / Qwen3 family	Qwen	—	paid
text-embedding-3-large	GPT	—	paid

Showing first 0 of a larger catalog.

Compare all free models across providers →

What you get

Official page: '$100 credit to use on Azure services within 12 months', 'No credit card required'

Renewable every year while you remain a student

Access to Azure OpenAI (o1, GPT-4 series) and 1,700+ Foundry models incl. Phi, Llama, Cohere

Includes generous always-free AI tiers (Translator, Speech, Vision, Content Safety)

Gotchas

Full-time university students only

Signup requires a valid school (.edu or institutional) email address verified as a full-time university student.
$100 credit per 12-month cycle

Each annual cycle provides exactly $100 in Azure credit; Azure OpenAI inference draws it down rapidly at production token volumes.
One account per person

Microsoft enforces a hard limit of one Azure for Students account per individual; no team or shared accounts.
20+ services free for 12 months only

New-customer 12-month free tiers for services like Azure VMs (750 hrs), PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Container Registry expire after the first year.
Educational/noncom orientation

The program's terms and Dev Tools for Teaching license restrict use to education, noncom research, and development/testing; production commercial workloads are outside the intended scope.

Sources

"Azure for Students gets you started with $100 in Azure credits to be used within the first 12 months, plus select free services as described below (services subject to change) without requiring a credit card at sign-up."
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/offers/ms-azr-0170p
"If you exhaust your available credits, your Azure subscription will be disabled. You may then upgrade to a Pay-As-You-Go subscription by contacting Azure Support."
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/offers/ms-azr-0170p
"Free monthly amounts of 65+ always-free services ... Renew your subscription annually and continue to get free access to Azure as long as you're a student."
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/students
"GPT-Chat Latest 05052026 Global · $5. Cached Input: $0.50. Output: $30"
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/azure-openai/

students azure-openai foundry cloud-credits no-card

Open service Source ← All LLM

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