GitHub Partners With DigitalOcean, Unreal Engine, Others To Give Students Free Access To Developer Tools

Back in the days of shrink-wrapped software, students would often get huge discounts on expensive software packages like Adobe’s Creative Suite or Microsoft’s developer tools. But because almost every developer startup has now moved to a SaaS model, it’s become a bit harder to find student discounts.

To help students start new software projects without breaking the bank, GitHub, Bitnami, Crowdflower, DigitalOcean, DNSimple, HackHands, Namecheap, Orchestrate, Screenhero, SendGrid, Stripe, Travis CI and Epic Game’s Unreal Engine are launching the GitHub Student Developer Pack, a new program to give students free access to their tools.

A GitHub spokesperson told me that the company already has about 100,000 students on its free plan, but with the Developer Pack, they can now get free access to a GitHub micro account (usually $7/month) with up to five private repositories for as long as they are students.

The other companies offer similar benefits — some for a year and some for as long as the student (13+) is enrolled in school. Unreal Engine is giving students free access to its $19/month subscription service, while Digital Ocean is making $100 worth of credit on its platform available to students. And once their project makes money, they can use Stripe to collect payments with fees waived on the first $1,000.

Overall, this looks like a pretty good program for students who want to get their first projects off the ground. Together with the free tiers on AWS, Azure and other platform, the GitHub Pack should give most students enough resources to get a pretty complex project off the ground.

To get access to the pack, students either need a school email address, valid student ID or some other proof of enrollment (enrollment letter, transcript, etc.). Students with existing GitHub student accounts will also automatically get access to the developer pack.

Here is a full list of all the benefits:

Bitnami
Install cloud applications in a single click
Business 3 plan (normally $49/month) for one year

Crowdflower
Crowdsourcing and data enrichment platform
Access to the Crowdflower platform (normally $2,500/month) and $50 in worker credit.

DigitalOcean
Simple cloud hosting, built for developers
$100 in platform credit

DNSimple
Simple DNS management with one-click services and a robust API
Bronze hosted DNS plan (normally $3/month) for two years

GitHub
Powerful collaboration, code review, and code management for open source and private projects
Micro account (normally $7/month) with five private repositories while you’re a student

HackHands
Live programming help available 24/7
$25 in platform credit

Namecheap
Domain name registration and SSL certificates
one year free domain name registration on the .me TLD (normally 8.99/year) and one year free SSL certificate (normally $9/year)

Orchestrate
Unified database as a service including search, key/value, graph, and events
Developer account (normally $49/month) while you’re a student

Screenhero
Screen sharing for collaboration in teams
Individual account (normally $9.99/month) while you’re a student

SendGrid
Email infrastructure as a service
Student plan (normally $4.95/month) for one year

Stripe
Web and mobile payments, built for developers
Waived transaction fees on first $1000 in revenue processed

Travis CI
Continuous integration platform for the open source and private projects
Private builds (normally $69/month) while you’re a student

Unreal Engine
A complete suite of game development tools made by game developers, for game developers
Unreal Engine (normally $19/month) while you’re a student