Being a student, you need as much help as you can get, and around that time having free software and services offered to you is a great thing.
Many companies offer their services at a discounted price or for completely free. This list will give you a wide variety of software or services you can get for free when you are in college, as well as the list of discounted software.
GitHub Student Developer Pack (Free Sofware offerings from GitHub):
This is the great work of GitHub education as they provide tons of software and services under this pack for free.
They periodically update their services and software as they get in touch with more clients and companies.
We will list a few constant and big names which will be really helpful during your college times and for your extracurricular learning.
Most of these are targeted for developers and IT.
You can check them out from the link below.
DigitalOcean (Best service for simple VPS):
This is a place where you can simply buy a VPS (virtual private server) and use it for many things like hosting a website or remote server or for some specific service like TeamSpeak.
Digital ocean is one of the leaders in this market as across the globe servers and tons of OS images students can use and they can even load up a custom image from the internet from a URL or your own ISO image.
This is flexible and supportive with great customer service and secure service of its type.
Here the credit of $50 is also given, that can be spent on this platform
MNX.io (VPS Cloud Hosting):
This is another service just like the digital ocean but based in the US.
Some people may have high ping issues because they have servers located in the US.
And also you can’t load from any other than a few given images.
But still, with 50$ of credit, you can host a static website or host files as the ping is not a critical feature in that case.
Termius (Best SSH client for Mobile and Desktop):
When you have a lot of VPSs, the most efficient way of using them would be to use SSH as that uses less data and is faster.
The termius is a cross-platform client for ‘SSH’ and many other protocols of communication and with great features like keyring and SSH key generator.
Free access to all features until you are a student.
NameCheap, name.com, and .tech domains:
Namecheap gives you a “.me” for one year with an SSL certificate.
Name.com will give you 1 free domain with SSL security and other services like email.
Whereas ‘.tech’ just gives you one free domain nothing else.
So as of February 2020, you can get 3 free domains and 2 with SSL certificates.
You can just make them forward at the VPS and use apache to host a website there and you have a website up and running.
DRovio (Team Collaboration tool):
When in projects with friends you might want to use this pair programming tool as that will help you improve your productivity.
With DRovio everyone gets their own cursor on the screen and everyone is in control.
Below is an example.
You get the program till you are a student but you have to renew it every 6 months.
Canva (Multimedia designing platform):
With this professional editor, you can create great graphics for your projects.
Use any of the amazing templates or create your own template for quick social media post creation. Access the big archive of 6000+ templates and free 4M+ pictures and videos.
With thousands of graphics and premium services, this is a very helpful tool during your college.
BetterCodeHub (Improve Code Quality):
Improve your coding by learning industry standards and code quality so your every project is perfect and clean looking.
This will analyze your pull and push requests and provide feedback on that.
Get 1 year of free individual plan free.
JetBrains IDE (Best in class Developer Tools):
To code, you will need IDE (Integrated Development Environment) and JetBrains Provides Professional IDEs for almost all Technologies for free while you are a student.
You can get below mentioned IDEs in the pack which will have to be renewed annually.
Education Host (Hosting your Work for free):
Take advantage of this platform to host your assignments and projects like web apps and node apps and many more ways to help you during your student years.
You will be given the things mentioned in the image below.
Cryptolens (License your Software):
As a student, you might make software which is very good and could be licensed to help you learn. By partnering with GitHub cryptolens did exactly that by providing the students with 10 free licenses and unlimited end users and analytic tools from the service for free.
BrowserStack, LambdaTest:
This is a great service for people who make web apps for cross platforms.
You get 2000+ browsers and real devices to test your web apps as the testing part is very important in the development of any kind.
As a package, you get the one-year subscription to their BrowserStack automation mobile pack which costs around 2388$.
On the other side, LambdaTest gives you almost the same plan so if you use them one after another you get 2 years worth of testing.
Autodesk (Truly Professional Design tools):
Autodesk is another giant company that helps the students by providing free software and services to those in need.
They provide almost all of their software for free for 3 years.
The list is as in the image shown below.
Some of the most used apps are AutoCAD, Fusion 360 and 3dsMAX.
You can access the page from the link below.
Office 365 (Free Microsoft Office tools):
Microsoft doesn’t back out from offering the students the benefits of their software for free either.
They let you use office 365 for free as long as you are a student and have an email associated with college.
This package provides you some of the most used apps in college for free, some of them are listed below.
- Microsoft Word
- Microsoft Excel
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- Microsoft Outlook
And many more.
You can see the page for that in the link below.
Asana for students (Manage your time):
Asana is a tool for organizing the work and keeping track of projects.
When you are a student keeping up with the assignments, homework, projects, and jobs can be a nightmare, but with an app like asana to help you organize all these things mentioned above it becomes easier and you can have the premium services for free as long as you are a student.
You can check them out in the link below.
Intel Free Software:
The blue giant intel also helps by providing a few sets of tools for free to the students interested in learning and exploring the field.
The software includes the below list
You can get more information about them from the below link.
Extra Discounts for Students:
Apart from the free things, there are also companies who will give you a great discount on their products which make them as good as the above.
Keep in mind that to be on the list the company has to offer at least 50% or more and must be very useful during college times.
Some of them are mentioned below.
Spotify (1 Month Free for Indian Student):
Spotify is not necessary for your college but it is a big company and a 1 month in price is a great example of how they want to help students.
You can verify yourself as a student and get a month for free and 59Rs/Month after that.
If you are in the US more good news as you can get three different services for the price of one.
The Hulu monthly ad-supported version and Showtime for the same price of 4.99$ per month.
You can check the offer for US students in the link below.
Adobe CC (60% off):
The adobe has a great collection of apps for the creators under CC (Creative Cloud) pack.
The popular apps included in the pack are shown in the below list there are many more which can be accessed HERE.
The big thing they did was that they also offered the same benefits for the teachers as well.
Apple Music (discounted rate):
Apple Music discounted the price of their monthly subscription by half and also for the people where available they threw another apple tv+ service for a limited time.
The verification will be done by UNiDays on the apple music app or website.
Check out more details below.
