change in home and student licenses
Walter Roberson
on 15 Jan 2026 at 0:19
Latest activity Reply by Walter Roberson
about 4 hours ago
https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/2182045-why-can-t-i-renew-or-purchase-add-ons-for-m…
"As of January 1, 2026, Perpetual Student and Home offerings have been sunset and replaced with new Annual Subscription Student and Home offerings."
So, Perpetual licenses for Student and Home versions are no more. Also, the ability for Student and Home to license just MATLAB by itself has been removed.
The new offering for Students is $US119 per year with no possibility of renewing through a Software Maintenance Service type offering. That $US119 covers the Student Suite of MATLAB and Simulink and 11 other toolboxes. Before, the perpetual license was $US99... and was a perpetual license, so if (for example) you bought it in second year you could use it in third and fourth year for no additional cost. $US99 once, or $US99 + $US35*2 = $US169 (if you took SMS for 2 years) has now been replaced by $US119 * 3 = $US357 (assuming 3 years use.)
The new offering for Home is $US165 per year for the Suite (MATLAB + 12 common toolboxes.) This is a less expensive than the previous $US150 + $US49 per toolbox if you had a use for those toolboxes . Except the previous price was a perpetual license. It seems to me to be more likely that Home users would have a use for the license for extended periods, compared to the Student license (Student licenses were perpetual licenses but were only valid while you were enrolled in degree granting instituations.)
Unfortunately, I do not presently recall the (former) price for SMS for the Home license. It might be the case that by the time you added up SMS for base MATLAB and the 12 toolboxes, that you were pretty much approaching $US165 per year anyhow... if you needed those toolboxes and were willing to pay for SMS.
But any way you look at it, the price for the Student version has effectively gone way up. I think this is a bad move, that will discourage students from purchasing MATLAB in any given year, unless they need it for courses. No (well, not much) more students buying MATLAB with the intent to explore it, knowing that it would still be available to them when it came time for their courses.
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On the other hand, what about an extra Toolbox Home License? Is it also a yearly subscription service?
It is really a bad news.
I have a Machine Learning for MATLAB book and am planning to buy a Home License to refresh knowledge in this field. Then by next year, I must pay again in order to run my book's and my codes.
Toolboxes for Home licenses are now by subscription. :(
I'm very sorry to hear that, but you can use MATLAB Online — there is a free monthly quota that includes 10 commonly used toolboxes similar to the MATLAB Home edition, including the Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox™.
If I've understood my younger colleagues right co-pilot et al. are becomming reasonably good at translating code between languages. This ought to make it way easier to transition between matlab, python, R, scilab and julia etc, which would make it far easier for seasoned amareur/hoby matlab-users to transition to open and free solutions. This Saas approach, to me, seems designed to reduce the number of student/hobbyist users.
Add to that, the translation capabilities are likely the worst they will ever be right now.
If the goal you identify is correct, I don't understand the motivation.
If history does indeed rhyme, then this reminds me about what happened to IDL, some 20-30 years ago it was still a viable competitor to matlab for the same type of tasks. Matlab won because it managed to become bigger - which lead to faster improvements and lower price. Since then IDL has "not flourished" as far as I understand things. I fear that matlab will meet the same fate.
I used to use IDL a fair bit in the early 90s, starting in roughly 1991. If I recall correctly, we had IDL before we had MATLAB. A small number of our people used MATLAB; at the beginning I was just in charge of the licensing software, and did not use it myself. Eventually I took on a project that used MATLAB, and at the same time our IDL development trailed off. Let's see... I do vaguely remember ENVI splitting off from IDL, so that would have been in 2000.
This change is a hard pill to swallow. In my mind, it's the day Mathworks transitions from a hobby-friendly company to a greedy SaaS provider; squeezing every cent of new users, and alienating their current base.
I used to be the one renovating my Home license for the following 3 years at a time, even if some years I have not used it at all. But no way I am spending $US165 on Matlab to find that it's unusable after 1 year.
It's sad seeing a company like Mathworks treating their hobbyists in this way. I hope they reconsider and reoffer perpetual licenses, even if they become more expensive
You many try GNU Octave which is a free software. It manages to be compatible with MATLAB m file.
Another free software is Maxima with GUI. I heard that it was the foundation of most algebra computer mathematics software.
Octave is only mostly compatible. If you take a look at my File Exchange submissions, you will note that there is often a code branch for Octave. It is slower, the debugging is 1000x times worse (though still better than Python), there are fewer implemented functions, and the graphics are less sleak. Octave may be free in money, but you'll pay for it in time (both during coding and during execution).
I have a firm belief the world is better with Matlab and Octave flourishing. They both have their uses and applications, neither being a true replacement for the other.
I was just reminded of a case. Sometimes you need to run a particular old version of MATLAB for compatibility reasons. With the prior setup, you could purchase the current MATLAB release once and use the license backwards compatibility feature to run the old release. With the new setup, you have to re-purchase every year, even though you are never using any new release. This is crazy.
Is there a difference in the student license price for different countries?
In my case (Brazil), the student offer is US$65 per year. How much will each individual toolbox cost? Before this change, it was US$16, if I’m not wrong.
If I recall correctly, only the commercial licenses have (had?) a global price. That is why it only really makes sense to talk about these prices in relative terms. The current price it shows for me is €85.
Also: this is ex VAT (which is a surprise for most buyers outside of the US).
The commercial prices were by region. For example, prices in India were lower than prices in the USA. You need to get permission from Mathworks before taking licenses between regions (they would make sure that you had paid the maximum price out of the prices for the regions being moved between, to ensure that people were not purchasing cheap licenses and then moving them to higher-cost places.)
I'm not sure what I should think about this change. For me the SMS was close to the price of a new license anyway, but I agree that at the very least the subconscious feeling is different.
I suspect this will mostly result in people pirating Matlab for home or student use. I always expected Mathworks to make its money from enterprise and academic licenses anyway.
This feels like the Dropbox-ification of Matlab: still technically superior, but pricing itself out of the market for anyone not already locked in. I hope I'm wrong.
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