Free Educational Discounts on Software
Recently I’ve been looking into Educational Discounts and package for students. I found a lot of interesting software that either provides a decent percent off, and sometimes comes completely free while you’re a student.
What is an Educational Discount?
An Educational Discount is a company or software that gives its product at a reduced (or free) price to Students currently enrolled in a school. For example, JetBrains offers all their IDEs for free to Students while they’re a student.
Why I enjoy companies that do this
I’ll be honest, when I was searching for Educational Discounts I was just looking for some free stuff to get. However over time I started seeing how many industry products offered a reduced price for students. While there’s tons of reasons that the company offers the Educational Discount to students, I still like to think that the company has provided it so that younger developers like myself can gather experience using expensive products, and continue learning about Computer Science.
Is it a smart move for them?
Besides the fact that they save money having to train people on their systems. It also gets their name out there to the younger developers. For example I got $100 from the GitHub Education Pack to use over at DigitalOcean. After spending the $100 in about 8~ months, I continued to use their service. It’s now been a little over a year since I started paying for my machine myself and I still cant be happier with it. And that is exactly what they wanted to happen, they give the student enough credit to get a nice system setup on their machines, then once your credit is spent instead of moving to a different service you just end up staying on theirs. It’s a great business move, I mean sure they lose money since there is more people that leave after spending the credit than those who stay, but I would assume they expected that when registering with GitHub to give out the $100 promo code.
What are some good Education Discounts I can get?
I’ve done some research into this to really see how many discounts are out there for Students. And let me tell you, there is a lot. I’ve linked some great resources below that have gathered lists of all the services that provide discounts.
FreeStudentSoftware.com - A nice little site that is dedicated just to student discounts.
GitHub Education Pack - The GitHub education pack. Offers some great products. My personal favorite.
Discount For Student Dev - A Repository created by AchoArnold that holds a list of sites and programs that offer Student Discounts.