
Ask HN: Free accounts for students? - defunkt
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).<p>"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!"<p>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.<p>Should we? Would you?
======
mdasen
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
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.

------
mixmax
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 :-(

~~~
boucher
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.

~~~
mixmax
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.

------
wallflower
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.

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

~~~
nostrademons
Yeah, but paying $7/month is super-easy for those with credit cards and
income. The point's to get people paying for it - for those who would anyway,
a simple nudge and slight incentive is probably all you need. And for those
who wouldn't pay for it anyway, you keep them using GitHub.

------
qhoxie
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.

~~~
bprater
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.

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

~~~
pclark
I'd just offer it as student account with one private hub, but don't check to
see if they are students?

------
sachinag
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?

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

------
tialys
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.

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

------
theantidote
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.

------
koenbok
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.

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

------
avinashv
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.

~~~
lpgauth
Not all universities uses _.edu emails for instance McGill uses_.ca.

------
gourneau
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.

------
Jebdm
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.

~~~
avinashv
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.

~~~
Jebdm
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.)

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

------
paulgb
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.

~~~
MikeW
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.

------
patio11
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.

------
eisokant
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.

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

------
run4yourlives
$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.

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

~~~
MikeW
Thanks for the advice - I subsequently did that. But I have to point out you
know nothing more about my situation than what I said in response to your
comment.

Just like GitHub are investigating possible outcomes of their situation - in
my situation I was perfectly able to survive on my means and dedicate 100% of
my time being top of my year, building a strong reputation within the school
of IT and working on my own tech projects that just happened not to be money
making exercises. Git was not used, SVN was. If Github existed at the time and
for free, I can think of a couple projects I built at the time that I would
could have used it for. I still strongly feel for certain classes of product,
a free version for students would get them hooked early - but it's a choice
GitHub have to make themselves. I hope I've provided counter points to the
"all students can afford this" argument and points for why a free student
license should exist.

------
lallysingh
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.

------
NoBSWebDesign
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.

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

------
drewcrawford
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
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.

------
makimaki
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..

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

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

------
umangjaipuria
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.

------
SapphireSun
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.

------
ALee
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
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.

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

------
rickharrison
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

------
abugosh
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.

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

------
vaksel
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

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

------
danw
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

------
zaidf
Unfuddle does it. And I love it.

------
pclark
I would - good hearts and minds.

------
albertcardona
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!

~~~
nostrademons
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
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.

~~~
nostrademons
Amherst College. It's pretty common at top private colleges, and it also seems
more common at rural schools than urban ones. If every college student in
Amherst needed to get an apartment, I think the townspeople would panic, since
there were 7000 of them and 35,000 of us. (Okay, this is misleading, since
about 32,000 of those college students are at UMass, which occasionally _does_
house students off-campus. Amherst and Hampshire don't, though.)

(Irony: many of these same students who go through 4 years never having to
manage money are then hired on Wall Street to...you guessed it...manage money.
Maybe that explains the current crisis.)

------
pageman
maybe special discounts? almost free?

