Ask HN: Free accounts for students?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420841

by defunkt • 18 years ago

41 88 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We charge for private repositories at GitHub. As a result, we often get emails from students asking for free, private accounts (usually of the $7/mo or $12/mo variety).

"I'm working on a website with some friends and we don't have any money. If we start making money, we'll gladly move to a paid account!"

While we offer free private accounts to instructors for classes, we haven't given students free accounts to work on commercial projects in the past.

Should we? Would you?

eisokant• 18 years ago

I think you should - the obvious point of view that it's just kind to do so. From a business perspective it's allowing you to hook in the future startup founders and coders. It'll get them excited and used to GitHub and in a few years from now when they're working somewhere or starting a new project they'd be more then happy to pay.

qhoxie4• 18 years ago

I like the idea of giving students free accounts, but I feel like it would probably be abused by too many people. If it is important that it be a private repo or they needs lots of space, they should consider setting up their own and then move to GH if they have revenue.

zepolen• 18 years ago

Doesn't that go against the point of GH in the first place?

Why use github if you can do it youself?

All you really need is an ssh account on a box.

qhoxie4• 18 years ago

Doesn't that go against the point of GH in the first place?

No, it doesn't. GitHub is a layer of niceties on top of Git. If they are doing commercial work and cannot afford it, they can set up Git for themselves until they can afford it. I fail to see how that is against the point of GitHub.

bprater• 18 years ago

Agreed, why not just offer one free private project at GitHub? No real programmer is going to have just one project.

If this were the case, I'm not so cheap as to create multiple accounts for multiple projects to bypass having to pay, so I'm guessing other people might be 'not cheap' either.

qhoxie4• 18 years ago

thats not a bad idea. one limited private repo would be good incentive to buy up if people like it

wallflower• 18 years ago

How many people would hang on to their GitHub student accounts way after they ceased being matriculated (fancy SAT word for registered) at that school? Maybe a one or two semester-long free trial - get them using it for their projects.

Usually, at a university, when you have a .edu email address, the school knows when you're a student. If you graduate or leave, unless you went to a school that graduates you to alumni.school.edu - you lose that email address.

guruz• 18 years ago

Huh. It's not fancy, it is latin (or well, english-latin). Just like the "university" and "semester" and "alumni" you used.

mdasen2• 18 years ago

Require an email confirmation at the student email address, say, annually. Also exclude alumni addresses (not too hard to filter 'alum%' or 'post%' and I don't know of schools that use different prefixes for their alumni (speak up if you know; note alum% would get things like alums, alumni, alumnus, alumnae, etc.).

-Sorry for using % as wildcard, but star becomes italics.

merrick33• 18 years ago

don't know about other schools, but I am an alumnus of UCLA and was able to recapture my @ucla.edu address.

ewoodh2o• 18 years ago

Georgia Tech also lets you keep your @gatech.edu address permanently, for free. Just having a .edu address does not prove you're associated with higher-ed.

When I signed up for GitHub, the free and a paid accounts were differentiated (to me at least) by the need to keep source code secure. If you remove that distinction by offering free student accounts, you'll end up with a lot of ex-students using them. The movie theaters out here in Arizona figured that out and now only offer student tickets on Thursday nights.

Any group of students trying to launch a website with any chance of turning into a profitable company will have figured out how to come up with $12/month.

PStamatiou2• 18 years ago

i still have my @gatech.edu, granted i did just graduate

sjs382• 18 years ago

There are other ways to determine whether someone is a student or alumni. I'm not saying its a GREAT way (or even scam-proof), but Facebook Connect comes to mind... I'm sure there are others.

nostrademons4• 18 years ago

Why not time-limit student accounts to a year or so? And require a .edu address to signup?

A year's a long time for a student. It's plenty for any coursework, and should be enough time to decide if a project will become a startup. And the hassle of moving things over gives people an incentive to switch to a real pro account instead of just mooching off the student account forever.

And you can get folks hooked on GitHub, so that's what they go for when they enter the working world.

jackowayed• 18 years ago

moving stuff over is super-easy with git. you make a new repo and push to it.

amoeba• 18 years ago

Two universities I no longer attend, both of which I haven't been a student of for at least three years, let me log into my student accounts just the same as I did when I was a student.

I don't think this is a surefire way of proving studentship.

soult• 18 years ago

Only students in America get .edu mail addresses. Many countries use .ac.ccTLD for educational institutions instead.

makimaki• 18 years ago

As long as cost is manageable and the number of free accounts limited, why not?

How about free accounts for a set period of time (3 mths)? And maybe setup a special referral program to give kickbacks (commission) to students who refer people who sign up for paid accounts. This can be credited to each students account. Don't know your audience though so these are just some general suggestions..

mdasen2• 18 years ago

I'd be in favor of it. In fact, it's one of the reasons that I use Mercurial/Bitbucket (bitbucket.org - they allow you to have one free private repo no matter who you are). Offering students a Micro plan probably wouldn't cut into profits too much and it will get them in the mindset of using git (rather than svn or hg or whatever). Most people don't like learning new things when they're comfortable with one - get them while they're young. You're the premier git host. More git people means more money for you.

psyklic• 18 years ago

You could also take a mid-range approach. Give students one free year, no credit card information required.

The vast majority of student projects will be very short-lived. If a project actually gets speed and lasts for more than a year, the founders would probably be happy to pay to keep it going.

sachinag• 18 years ago

I remember downloading Netscape Navigator for free as a student. I also remember doing the same on my father's work computers.

Unless you absolutely need the network effects - and I don't think you do - then I say no. We've thought about a reduced commission structure for students at Dawdle, and I just can't justify it - when do you expire free access?

NoBSWebDesign• 18 years ago

I know one of our startup's founding principles is to always be free for students. I was a student when we started it and know all to well how tight money is. I don't feel right contributing to the insane amount of debt American university students are already forced to take on.

If you're worried about abuse, you could provide a free account to registered students, which you can verify with their .edu email address. To keep the account free and active, you could send them a confirmation email once a year (or 6 months) to make sure their original .edu address is still active.

paulgb2• 18 years ago

Keep in mind that .edu is primarily US-only. For other countries you will need to make or find a whitelist.

paulgb2• 18 years ago

Yes!

Most students I know who know what git is are technically adept enough to install Trac and svn, or their own git or hg central repo, and would rather do that than pay $7-$12/month. So I doubt you'd be losing many paying customers by offering free student accounts. But once people moved on to other projects, they are more likely to go with what they know, which will by then include GitHub.

MikeW3• 18 years ago

I agree. I spent a considerable amount of time learning about/setting up/configuring my own SVN server and tools around it simply because I couldn't find a free hosted alternative that didn't expose my source code.

If I had a free github/alternative account I'd probably give it a shot and give that my time. Although more for curiousity sake... git doesn't integrate with the VS.net IDE which I spend a lot of my time in.

They wouldn't lose me as a paying customer because I never intended on paying in the first place (as evidenced by spending more than $7 of my time in setting up an alternative). They may gain an interested follower in the long run.

pageman• 18 years ago

maybe special discounts? almost free?

Jebdm2• 18 years ago

Chances are, whatever they're building doesn't need to be put in private repositories. If it really does (as in, they're working on commercial stuff), $7 a month (even $12) shouldn't be hard to scrounge up, and I'm an in-the-red student myself. After all, we all need to learn about business expenses sometime--and they're not having to worry about paying for food or rent. If a private repo is that important to them, most schools offer private server space. I say no.

avinashv2• 18 years ago

It's quite a leap to say that students don't have to worry about paying for food or rent. I would go out on a limb and say millions of students do just that.

boucher2• 18 years ago

Agreed. I paid for food, rent, books, tuition, etc. I'm still paying for the tuition, probably will be for the next 10 years :).

Jebdm2• 18 years ago

Don't get me wrong--I'm paying for food and rent--just for many (most?) it's covered in their loans/scholarship/whatever. I guess I wasn't thinking about people who work at the same time, though. (My school requires everyone to be on a meal plan and to live on campus or prove that they can live off campus, so I forget that people at other schools have to worry about it.)

danw• 18 years ago

It's a good idea, but theres no easy way of verifying if some one is a student. Facebook back when it was student only had a big list of valid uni domains but this only worked for the universities they'd rolled out to

albertcardona• 18 years ago

I don't know of any student who, in interest of their project, couldn't save $7 or $12/mo. That's only one or two Starbucks purchases!

lallysingh3• 18 years ago

They can, but students can be cheap for its own sake.

epall• 18 years ago

I'm so cheap I'm teaching myself Python so I can use App Engine's free hosting! And I even have a research stipend.

mdolon• 18 years ago

When I was in college, food was a necessity in order to survive and was a justified expense in my head. Starbucks, on the other hand, was an occasional luxury that I typically tried to avoid. For a college student who is probably paying for hosting and domain names on top of all their required college expenses, it makes more sense to use a free alternative or a completely different system (svn) rather than add on another monthly expense. At least that was what college was like for me and so now I'm stuck on subversion.

If I had the opportunity to try out GitHub for free, I would have jumped on the opportunity and would probably eventually switch to a paying customer.

qhoxie4• 18 years ago

The alternative to GitHub isn't svn, it's git.

PStamatiou2• 18 years ago

how about a onetime fee of one month worth of whatever they are requesting, if you are going to go to the free for students route

catch23• 18 years ago

I never went to starbucks as a student... cmon, when you're making zero cash, you're basically living off of whatever you made during the summer, or begging parents to help pay for stuff. Or you're using student loans that you'll have to pay someday. Could you beg your parents for $7 to drink coffee? come now!

nostrademons4• 18 years ago

There's a qualitative difference between "pay" and "no-pay", particularly among students with no income.

When I was in college, I had essentially no cash flow. Nothing in, nothing out. The college dining hall was open 7 days/week, so I always ate there instead of eating out or cooking. (The only times I ate out were the TYPO - "Take Your Professor Out" - dinners, which the school paid for.) Room & board was completely paid for, and we weren't allowed to live off-campus. Internet access was provided by the college, as was webhosting. Student activities (I did sailing, orchestra, taiko, some artsy-crafty stuff, and a variety of other things that would've otherwise been expensive) all came out of the student activities fund, which was paid with our tuition. I bought books once a semester with a credit card that went to my parent's account. After the first year, I didn't bother signing up for a room phone, instead using my cell phone, again paid for by my parents. The only thing I ended up paying for was ordering Wingz or pizza at midnight, or alcohol contributions to parties.

There were many purchases that I could easily have afforded that I didn't bother with, because it meant I would've had to worry about money. They included Starbucks, going out for meals or ice cream, paid LiveJournal accounts, actually buying music, and basically anything that required a credit card (I didn't have my own until I got a job after college). If GitHub had existed back then and charged, I would've said "Screw it, I'll setup my own git account on a college server, and we can all pull from that."

The cost isn't just $7-12/month. It's all the time spent balancing bank statements or checking over credit card bills that you wouldn't otherwise need to worry about if you never use money.

icco• 18 years ago

I'm rather curious were you went to school, this sounds kinda nice. It's the direct opposite situation here (very little on campus housing, cook all my own food, don't do too may extracurricular activities because it's all rather expensive) but I come to the same conclusion. Except that our school servers don't let us host git repos, so I need an external place to store code.

avinashv2• 18 years ago

I say yes. You could flag all accounts registered with a .edu email address and send out a confirmation email at the start of traditional semesters--i.e., September and January. A graduate shouldn't have an email address by then. Once it happens, drop them to the free account. It would be really cool if you guys would just freeze the private repos and leave them there for a bit while the account exists so that people can get their data.

$7/mo and $12/mo are $84/yr and $144/yr respectively. That's money that I would rather put to rent/utilities/cable as a student.

Of course, many universities allow students to keep their .edu for a fee after they graduate, but you have to imagine the number of people paying for a .edu to maintain a free GitHub account is going to be pretty small.

lpgauth2• 18 years ago

Not all universities uses .edu emails for instance McGill uses .ca.

mixmax3• 18 years ago

T = turnover per client per month

E = variable expense per client per month

A = Average lifetime of a customer in months

P = Percent of students that turn into paying customers

As = Average lifetime of a student account before it is either terminated (graduated) or turned into a paying account

The lifetime value of a customer is (T-E)xA The cost of a student account is ExAs The acquisition cost of one customer that has previously been a student is ExAs/P

if ExAs/P < (T-E)xA then you should do it.

Stick the numbers into an excel sheet and play around with the basic assumptions. Chances are that your answer will be obvious.

Note I had to use x for multiplication since the character normally used for this is used for markup :-(

boucher2• 18 years ago

Agree that you should try to figure out what doing so would actually cost, and what you might hope to gain from the situation.

Of course, if the costs are expected to be relatively low (which I would imagine, given that it isn't likely to be a large % of your users), even if the expected value is zero, you should consider the goodwill and potential long term benefits you might gain.

Plus, you can always try giving out free student accounts, and then if it becomes too expensive, stop. You might even consider a manual approval process, just to make it enough effort that most people won't bother unless they really want it.

mixmax3• 18 years ago

There are of course many factors you could include. If you do an excel sheet it is pretty trivial to include all sorts of numbers.

The advantage of this approach is that instead of just guessing you'll be naking an informed decision based on an assessment of the underlying assumptions. In my opinion this is hugely superior to just guessing.

ScottWhigham• 18 years ago

Can you explain "turnover per client per month"?

mixmax3• 18 years ago

It's simply what a customer is paying you each month.

tialys• 18 years ago

I'm a student with a paid plan, and I'd love it if you'd give up even 1 free private repo with more than one collaborator. I don't need a ton of repositories, but It'd be cool to not have to worry about having more than one person working on a project. I think it'd be a great way to get more people interested and develop customers in the long run. Also, I'm going to give a talk about Git at our next ACM meeting in a week or so, if I could hook people up with some kind of free private account they could play with, I think you'd have a few new customers.

tlrobinson• 18 years ago

Providing SCM to universities is a great idea. My university's CS program didn't once expose us to source control, which I think was a mistake. Going through four years of not using source control produced some bad habits which took a little while to rectify (my source control consisted of occasionally doing "tar czf backup-timestamp.tar.gz project" occasionally)

Our UPE chapter (CS honor society) tried setting up a SVN system, but it never really got off the ground.

defunkt• 18 years ago

To clarify: we already offer GitHub to universities for educational purposes.

vaksel• 18 years ago

seems like a pain in the ass...why not simply give people with .edu accounts a 1 year free access, and then make them pay? 1 year should be plenty of time for a person to make something thats $12 a month profitable

theantidote• 18 years ago

As a student I say "Yes!"

Just require a valid .edu address at sign up and send a confirmation email. Allow students to put in their edu email as well as their personal email because I really only use my personal account, as do most of my friends. Just send a confirmation email each semester or something as recommended by another commenter and that should be strong enough verification. Some people may try to cheat the system by either using an alumni email address (which you should filter: alumni.*.edu) or purchasing an edu domain to host their own email on, but those are both very unlikely and I doubt you'll run into them often if at all. There is at least one school that I know of that doesn't give out email addresses to its students anymore (Boston College or University, I forget which one); for those students just put a note next to the .edu field saying something along the lines of "Your school doesn't give you .edu addresses? Just email us and we'll help you out."

I don't think there's much else you can do to verify student accounts. If you're really ambitious you can ask for the student's ID number, full legal name, and university and then call up the registrar office to verify their registration. My school also participates in the National Student Clearinghouse: http://www.studentclearinghouse.org/ but it costs money for each verification. Obviously these options are kind of extreme and I'm pretty sure only banks and hiring agencies would spend the time verifying an enrollment this way.

SapphireSun• 18 years ago

Working on a startup as a student has a lot of unique challenges. When I'm away from school, there's no where good to work. When I'm at school, everything vies for my attention.

I've discovered that the public library is extremely useful. The thing is, the soon as my project takes off I'd be willing to spend money, but with my resources so constrained, I really have to be frugal.

If you perform a service for the public good, I have a feeling that within a few years, it will start to pay back in some way. Whether it puts you in the black from providing free service is another question.

The public library doesn't have much to look forward to because the people that hang out there are mostly old. However, a service where people are creating value is likely to turn over into something useful to the service provider in some way. You might want to consider offering the free service to students for a year and watching the conversion rate.

  If nothing else, you'll certainly help train the next generation of software engineers which will certainly turn into something useful for everyone.

koenbok• 18 years ago

We (from http://www.versionsapp.com, a Mac SVN client) had the same debate in our mail group. We decided against free as we want to offer email support to everyone and that just costs money. We ended up giving almost 50% off and almost everyone seems to be satisfied with that.

pclark3• 18 years ago

are you racing to support git? seems like you released a few months before the git craze swept the internet.

run4yourlives• 18 years ago

$7? Couldn't you just politely tell them to drink 2 or 3 less beers a month?

Seriously, I think the "I'm a student, I'm so poor" shitck is getting a little tired.

I think you'd get a better bang for your buck (in the feel good department) by offering free accounts to Indian/east European coders, given purchasing power.

mountain_man• 18 years ago

A lot of students really are that poor. I went to a state school, where tuition was 1500 a semester, my apartment cost 104/month, and I spent 100 on food a month. I wasn't atypical among my friends. I never went to the bars. Spending 2-4 days worth of food money on a source code repository would not have even crossed my mind as possible. There are a lot of people at public schools, and they have very different resources than those at private. 7 dollars a month does seem small compared to 30,000 a year.

MikeW3• 18 years ago

I had eactly €100 per 5day week for most of my first year at college. €65 was my accomodation (quite a distance from the college) which included breakfast €4.50 lunch at college x 4 days (I'd frequently get it for less + drink because the lady on the till liked me) €3 for a sandwich/roll x 5 days which I'd eat in the evening. I had to budget because I had NO OTHER INCOME so your remark about beers doesn't cut it. My blood just boiled when I saw you generalising students like that.

And there is a considerable leap between using something for free and paying any money for it.

rfunduk• 18 years ago

In this situation one normally considers getting a job of some sort.

travisjeffery• 18 years ago

Even though it may become complex I think it should be judged per project. WingIDE (Python IDE) for example gives out free copies of it's Professional version to people who have existing semi-notable Python projects. So you could do something similar. Or perhaps just a discount. Just as long as people don't abuse your services.

cstejerean• 18 years ago

Semi-notable projects are likely to be open source, and GitHub is already free for open source projects.

transburgh• 18 years ago

You could do 3 or 6 months for free then charge if they have a school email.

pc• 18 years ago

The people suggesting .edu email address verification (especially fancy systems with 'alum' filtering) forget non-US colleges.

One solution might be to use Facebook Connect -- I'm not sure if you'd have access to all the data you need, but people on FB tend to be honest about this kind of personal info, FB maintains a comprehensive list of colleges (and requires email verification to join a college network), and for extra security you could perhaps restrict it to people with over 10 friends in the college network, to make it a bit harder to scam.

jules• 18 years ago

First you warn about forgetting non-US colleges and then you suggest Facebook Connect? :P

vorador• 18 years ago

What about the _rare_ student who don't have a facebook account ?

lallysingh3• 18 years ago

I'm a student -- and have been for way too long.

My answer's no for free. Instead, a heavy discount's a good idea. You can make it really significant, like 50-90% off. Cheap enough for anyone serious to afford it.

But, the fact that it isn't free will get most of the worthless ones off your back.

jfornear• 18 years ago

I think you should only consider giving free accounts to students who go out of their way to ask.

gourneau• 18 years ago

As one of these student with no money, yes that would be awesome. I enjoy using github.com, however because I need to protect my source I have been using http://unfuddle.com as a single user. It works, and it is nice, but it is a single user environment (the free version).

I would prefer to use github.com, just think of it as a mini-investment for each student startups. I for one would pledge to use your service for a while if any of my ideas "make it". In addition to this it might encourage students who use your service to become evangelists for github.com once they matriculate from college.

abugosh• 18 years ago

Speaking as a student that is about to start working on a startup I think the prices are fair and hell, I'll probably end up signing up for GitHub myself in the next couple weeks.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

1-3 month for free. That should be enough to see the value.

umangjaipuria• 18 years ago

It would be a bit like investing in your customer's business. You want to, but is that the business you're in?

Besides, the two all important questions: How do you decide who is deserving of the free account, and how do you know when they should start paying. You need to cover these both rationally and legally.

pclark3• 18 years ago

I would - good hearts and minds.

tsally• 18 years ago

Absolutely not. I'm a student and it's easy enough to come up with $7 dollars a month for something you care about.

patio11• 18 years ago

I (very occasionally) get asked for free copies of my software. Past reasons have included "I am a nun", "I live in a country where $25 is a lot of money", and "I teach at an inner city school district with no instructional aid budget".

I told the first person to ask this that I would make an exception just this once and "write off" one copy as a marketing expense. (Nota bene for US-based software writers: you cannot actually treat free licenses as a business expense.) This is also what I have told any subsequent people who were motivated enough to try to ask for it.

My theory: software licenses cost me nothing to issue, I can say "Yes" faster than I can say "No", and I already am philosophically OK with giving out metric tonnes of free value to get a small percentage of visitors to pay because that is, after all, my entire business model. The fact that this practice creates rabidly vocal fans of my business is a bonus.

lpgauth2• 18 years ago

Make sure you ask for a scanned studend id or something so that you get less "fake students", but this would be great.

rickharrison• 18 years ago

I have been wanting to try GitHub for use in my new startup, but I cant justify paying for it out of my extremely shallow pockets. I know if I used it now I would upgrade in the future as funding allows

kjell• 18 years ago

I was considering working for the CSCI department at my school to update the cobwebbed CVS repository hosted in our lab that some teachers actually expected students to use to turn in code. Funding/grant hurdles and my graduation got in the way, but I was thinking what would be awesome is some kind of sub–github: maybe a walled–off version of the entire site restricted to students at a particular school and their professors and TAs. In whatever case, some kind of github.edu site, where CSCI departments sign up and encourage student use would be a lot cooler than just giving students free accounts.

I paid for an account for about 7 or so months while I was a student, but after a few of my private collaborative projects slowed down or ended I was paying for nothing and have now cancelled.

pjhyett• 18 years ago

You'll be able to purchase a GitHub license in a few months, tell your school to buy a copy!

drewcrawford• 18 years ago

When working on our startup, we used to use Assembla solely because it was free. After we moved past the whiteboard phase, we switched to Unfuddle immediately. The productivity gain alone... If your site is awesome (like GitHub), peopel will pay for it, even students. The bigger problem (for us at least) was not lack of funding, but lack of a funding method. Source control should really be a business expense. Sure, everyone can kick me five bucks or something, but that tends to make accountants mad.

waratuman• 18 years ago

I would like to have a free account, but I don't think that a free account should be given out to students. I understand give private accounts to instructors, however, $7 a month is very little and think that most students could come up with the money. I truly enjoy using github, and think that $7 or $12 per month is a great value.

If the account were to be free I think that there should be a timeframe for which the account should be free (for 2 - 4 years). After that the user is given the option to continue or drop the account.

ALee• 18 years ago

At the very least, do it for students working on projects related to their classes (in which an instructor approves).

Think Lexis-Nexis. Get students so acclimated to your product that the mere use of it is your competitive advantage. Set some limits on git like what psyklic was saying.

cabalamat• 18 years ago

It's already free for open source. If someone wants to use it for a commercial product, they shouldn't mind paying commercial prices. It's not as if $7 a month is a fortune.

What you might want to do, however, is give people a free trial period of say 3 months.

zaidf• 18 years ago

Unfuddle does it. And I love it.

Ask HN: Free accounts for students?

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