Trouble with Student Codespaces

[pngwen]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Billing & Payment Issues

Hi everyone,

Starting this term, my students have been telling me that they have been locked out of using GitHub Codespaces. Specifically, it claims they have exhausted their development time, even though they have fallen well short of the promised 180 hours for the month. The problem has become so pervasive that I now have 4 out of 5 students unable to use Codespaces. A few have resorted to paying for additional time, but in some cases even that does not work.

My question is, has there been some sort of change to the benefits in the student package? Is anyone else seeing this? It has gotten so bad for us that we are about to move toward in-house hosting of coding tools. I would rather keep access to GitHub Codespaces as that's a more real-world setup, but at the same time the service has simply become too unreliable for me to use it for student projects.

[NexzaDev]

Hi @pngwen,

That sounds really frustrating, especially with 4 out of 5 students locked out. I can't say whether something changed on GitHub's side this term, but a few things are worth checking, because they trip people up a lot:

1. Core hours vs. real hours. The 180 hours in the student benefit (GitHub Pro) are core hours, not wall-clock hours. A 2-core machine uses 2 core hours per hour, so that's about 90 real hours. A 4-core machine burns through it in 45 hours. If your students picked bigger machine types, they could hit the limit much sooner than expected.

2. Storage counts too. Codespaces storage (20 GB-month on Pro) is separate, but running out of it can also block new or restarted codespaces. Stopped codespaces still use storage until they're deleted, so it's worth deleting old ones.

3. Check the usage page. Each student can look under Settings → Billing and licenses → Usage to see what they've actually consumed. That would show whether it's core hours, storage, or something else.

4. Spending limit. The paid top-ups usually fail if the spending limit is $0 or the payment method isn't set up properly. That might explain why paying didn't work for some of them.

5. Idle timeout. If codespaces are left running instead of stopping, they keep using hours. Lowering the default idle timeout in Codespaces settings helps.

If the usage page shows well under the limit and they're still blocked, I'd open a ticket with GitHub Support (support.github.com) with a few affected usernames and screenshots. For education-related problems you can also go through the GitHub Education support form. Other people reporting the same thing here would help show it's more than a one-off.

Hope you get it sorted. A real-world setup like Codespaces is definitely worth keeping if it can be made stable.