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Foundry Tools
Formerly known as Azure AI Services or Azure Cognitive Services is a unified collection of prebuilt AI capabilities within the Microsoft Foundry platform
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Hello Abody,
Thanks for sharing the email, this is actually a positive update, not something to worry about.
What Microsoft is offering here is an upgrade within Azure AI Services (Foundry) from Free Tier to Tier 1. This does not change your Azure for Students subscription, and it does not automatically start charging you. You’ll still be using your existing student credits just like before.
If you choose to stay on Free Tier, you can click the opt-out link within 3 days and everything will remain exactly the same same limits, same restrictions.
If you do nothing, your subscription will move to Tier 1 automatically. In that case, you’ll get higher quotas and better access to models, which is usually helpful. For example, issues like not seeing regions, getting 0 TPM capacity, or being unable to deploy certain models are often tied to Free Tier limitations and Tier 1 helps remove those restrictions.
In terms of cost, nothing changes immediately. You’re still covered by your Azure for Students credits. The only time billing becomes relevant is if you exhaust your credits and then explicitly upgrade your subscription to Pay-As-You-Go.
About downgrading in most cases, yes, you can go back to Free Tier, but it’s not something you toggle yourself. You’d need to raise a support request, and once downgraded, you’ll go back to the original Free Tier limits.
As for Free Tier limits, they’re intentionally quite small limited tokens, limited throughput, and restricted model access. You can check your exact quota in Foundry under Usage + Quotas, where it shows what’s assigned per model and region.
Overall, unless you have a specific reason to stay restricted, it’s generally better to let it upgrade to Tier 1. It won’t cost you anything upfront, but it will make your experience much smoother especially if you’re trying to deploy models like GPT-4.1.
Please refer this
• Manage your AI Service quotas (Usage + quotas in Azure AI Studio): https://dori-uw-1.kuma-moon.com/azure/ai-studio/how-to/quota#view-and-request-quotas-in-azure-ai-studio
• Deploy models via managed compute (quota considerations): https://dori-uw-1.kuma-moon.com/azure/ai-studio/how-to/deploy-models-open?tabs=azure-studio#deploy-open-models
• What are Foundry Tools? (general AI services overview): https://dori-uw-1.kuma-moon.com/azure/ai-services/what-are-ai-services?wt.mc_id=knowledgesearch_inproduct_azure-cxp-community-insider
I Hope this helps. Do let me know if you have any further queries.
If this answers your query, please do click Accept Answer and Yes for was this answer helpful.
Thank you!