What are some free online services/products for students?

December 23, 2011 9:38 PM

I'm looking for free versions of paid products offered to students (or just in general). Examples of what I'm looking for:

• Github offers two years free to students upon request of their micro plan.
• Amazon Prime is free for students for a trial period
• MSDNAA

I'm primarily interested in SaaS/programming-type offerings but anything useful would be great. I'm open to non-student free things too such as the AWS free tier or electronics components from manufacturers (<3 TI).
posted by EsotericAlgorithm to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Heroku's add-ons feature a bevy of free-tier offerings.
posted by lantius at 9:56 PM on December 23, 2011

Not sure if this is quite what you mean, but both universities I've been at supply loads of free software and site access to their students, often through their library system and/or help desk. So by logging into a student account you can browse Lexis Nexis, JSTOR, etc., or download Microsoft Office 7, for example.

Also googling "student discounts" or "academic discounts" turns up a lot of sites devoted to gathering different types of discounts together - software, travel, etc.
posted by vegartanipla at 10:18 PM on December 23, 2011

Autodesk will give free versions of AutoCAD and other very expensive apps to students. The output of said software is watermarked to indicate that it comes from an educational version, but the products are otherwise full-featured versions. The license does prohibit commercial use as well.
posted by zachlipton at 10:46 PM on December 23, 2011

Response by poster: I've found a couple sites that aggregate some of this information but they exclude a lot of services that I would be unaware of otherwise unless I was a user of the service to begin with a la Github. lantius's answer is exactly what I am looking for.
posted by EsotericAlgorithm at 12:13 AM on December 24, 2011

Here's a good list from Reddit:
What programs can I get with a .edu address?
posted by suedehead at 2:33 AM on December 24, 2011

Kiln (hosted Mercurial version control) and Fogbugz (bug tracker) have a free Student and Startup version.
posted by davar at 4:30 AM on December 24, 2011

You can get a middle tier Prezi account for free, which both my wife and I have used to good effect on presentations. It's got wow-factor and it's fun to play around with.
posted by monkeymadness at 4:38 AM on December 24, 2011

Check out this previous thread for some more.
posted by backwards guitar at 5:20 AM on December 24, 2011

Dreamspark - Free development tools (and operating systems) from Microsoft for anyone with a .edu email address.

BizSpark - Free Microsoft software (OS/Dev/DB) for anyone working at a startup (that has been going for less than 3 years)
posted by blue_beetle at 5:47 AM on December 24, 2011 [1 favorite]

Bitbucket has unlimited accounts for students, either Git or Mercurial.
posted by Canageek at 6:07 AM on December 24, 2011