It’s expensive being a full-time student. College Board estimated the 2016-2017 school year to cost between $24,610 and $49,320, depending on a number of factors.
The bright side is that as a student, you can get a lot of great software and subscriptions for free or very cheaply.
And if free stuff isn't exciting enough, these software deals will also give you headstart on your career. One simple but powerful way beef up your entry-level resume is by adding software skills. The right software will make you a more attractive candidate, as well as helping you with soft skills like organization and time management.
Here are fourteen of the best student software discounts that help you gain skills without prohibitive price tags.
- Best Software Discounts to Manage Your Homework
- Best Software Discounts for Writing and Note-Taking
- Best Software Discounts to Prepare for Your Future Career
- Bonus Student Discounts
Best Software Discounts to Manage Your Homework
| App | Icon: | Use It To: | Student Price: | Regular Price: |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| WolframAlpha |  |
Speed up research and solve math problems | $4.75/mo | $5.49/mo |
| OmniFocus |  |
Make sure you never forget important tasks | $24.99 | $49.99 |
| Asana |  |
Track and organize your coursework, and manage group projects | Free | $9.99/mo |
| TextExpander |  |
Save time on repetitive typing with text snippets | $2.33/mo | $3.33 |
Wolfram|Alpha Pro
Speed up research and solve math problems
WolframAlpha is a computational knowledge engine—and every student's best friend. Think of it as part search engine and part calculator, with an education-focused knowledge base. You can get information from WolframAlpha on just about everything: complex mathematics, history, design, linguistics, sciences, geography, culture, nutrition… You name it, and WolframAlpha probably has details about it it. Find everything from the names of key historical events to the nutritional value of a handful of peanut M&Ms—powerful enough that Apple uses it to power many of Siri's answers.
It's best, though, at math. WolframAlpha Pro is built on Wolfram's slightly more well known Mathematica tools, and gives you the computational power to design and analyze complex graphics, solve equations, built interactive data visualizations, create your own web apps, and directly download WolframAlpha computations and data for use in your own models.
Homework not challenging enough—or too challenging? WolframAlpha Pro can generate random practice problems for several mathematical disciplines and skill levels, so you can continue to sharpen your skills. On the flip side, if you're having trouble understanding a concept, their step-by-step math solution tool will guide you through the steps to solving your math homework, teaching you all the way.
WolframAlpha Student Discount: Wolfram|Alpha Pro is available to students for $4.75/month (versus a regular price of $5.49/mo). This discount applies to both high school and college students.
Subscribe to Wolfram|Alpha's student plan.
OmniFocus
Make sure you never forget important tasks
If you're looking for a way to manage the juggling act that is your college education, OmniFocus is a good place to start. OmniFocus is a personal task management app based on the GTD (Getting Things Done) method that's designed to help you stay on top of everything in your life.
Organize your tasks by date, list, and priority, then sort them with multiple views, filters, and priorities. Group tasks into projects to keep tasks from each class and internship together. Notes, due dates, context fields, labels, and more help you add layers of organization to your tasks, so you can see what you need to see when you need to see it. OmniFocus even reminds you periodically to look through your projects to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks. Check out how other students use OmniFocus to get ideas for your own workflows—or read through Zapier's OmniFocus Guide to help you get started.
OmniFocus Student Discount: OmniFocus gives students a discounted standard license for $24.99, versus the usual license price of $39.99. If you want more customization and automation options, OmniFocus Pro is available to students for $49.99, versus the regular price of $79.99.
Asana
Track and organize your coursework, and manage group projects
When you’re juggling a full semester of assignments, quizzes, and essays, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks. And in group projects, it’s hard to make sure everyone pulls their weight. Asana, a popular project management tool, aims to solve these problems for students.
Asana is powerful enough to be central command for your projects while also being flexible enough adapt to your team's specific workflow. It uses has a familiar checklist format, along with intuitive collaboration tools that give you a taste of how you'll likely manage teamwork at work once you graduate.
Asana’s core tool is already free, and sufficient for the needs of most students. But to add value for group projects and student organizations, Asana offers their premium plan free for student groups.
Here’s how it works:
- Sign up for an Asana account with your student email address.
- Set up an Asana workspace and name it after your student group. (This name could be a group project name, the name of your student organization, or even just a group made up of your closest college friends.)
- Invite more than 5 teammates to this workspace, but fewer than 100.
- Now you’re eligible for Asana’s premium plan for students!
Asana Student Discount: Asana offers their Premium Plan free to students for six-months, which includes unlimited dashboards, custom fields, and task dependencies. (Compare to $9.99/mo for the same Premium features.)
Subscribe to Asana's student plan.
Current students and new graduates interested in a software career may also want to check out Asana’s university program, which provides internships and entry-level job opportunities at Asana.
TextExpander
Save time on repetitive typing with text snippets
We joke about text abbreviations like "lol" and "afk" not actually saving any time. But what if you could type in "afk" and have your computer instantly paste a well-written email to your professor about how your dog ate your keyboard (so of course your paper will be late)? That's what TextExpander does, in essence—it saves you time by letting you type custom abbreviations to add chunks of text.
Here's how it works: Save text snippets in TextExpander, anything from email addresses and emails to signatures, code chunks, form letters, images, and more. TextExpander saves these snippets with a shortcut, and syncs them to all your devices. Then when you want to use a snippet, simply type in your designated abbreviation (ie, ;fam to populate an email about a family emergency that you can send to your professors individually) and TextExpander inserts the full snippet.
TextExpander Student Discount: TextExpander offers students their standard plan for $2.33/mo (billed annually), which includes unlimited usage and snippets synced across devices. This price is 30% off the standard price of $3.33/mo, and is good for four years.
Sign up for a TextExpander free trial, then contact TextExpander support to have your student discount applied to your account.
Best Software Discounts for Writing and Note-Taking
| App | Icon: | Use It To: | Discount Price: | Regular Price: |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Evernote |  |
Organize all your notes and information | $34.99/yr | $69.99/yr |
| Office 365 |  |
Tackle essays, presentations, notes, and more | Free | $99.99/yr |
| Scrivener |  |
Organize your papers, essays, and thesis | $35 Windows; $38 Mac | $40 Windows; $45 Mac |
| Ulysses |  |
Write without distraction in Markdown | $1.83/mo | $4.99/mo |
Evernote
Organize all your notes and information
If you’re going to spend hours of your day taking study notes on lectures and textbooks, make sure you’re getting the most out of your notes. Although there are over a dozen great note-taking apps you could try, few are as robust and feature-rich as Evernote.
With Evernote, you can save webpages, images, PDFs, scanned business cards, audio recordings, and, of course, your own notes (typed or handwritten). It's an ideal place to capture and save all the information you’re going to need later.
Evernote also syncs your notes between your phone, laptop, and the cloud, so you can always have your notes with you and up to date, wherever you go.
And with additional Premium features like annotated PDFs, presentation mode (perfect for group discussions), a powerful search feature, and more cloud storage space, Evernote is designed to be the student’s friend.
Evernote Student Discount: Evernote offers students 50% off Evernote Premium, which puts the cost at only $34.99/year, versus a yearly cost of $69.99.
Subscribe to Evernote's student plan.
Office 365
Tackle essays, presentations, notes, and more
Microsoft Office is the standard for word processing, spreadsheets, and more—and is still required or recommended at most universities. For a wide variety of jobs, you’ll find experience in Microsoft PowerPoint or Excel listed as a big plus, and sometimes a required skill.
In addition to the classic suite of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook, Office 365 includes several cloud-based tools designed to make it even easier to save, sync, and collaborate on your homework:
- OneDrive, Microsoft’s file sync app, lets you store your files online, edit Office documents in the free Office Online apps, and easily access your online files. Instantly backup your notes, papers, and presentations—then open them from any device, even a library computer. An Office 365 subscription gives you 1TB of storage so you can store everything online (compared to the 5GB OneDrive's free plans offer).
- OneNote is Microsoft’s note-taking app, designed to make it easy to sync ideas, sketches and notes across all your devices. Featuring a web clipper and flexible interface that encourages creative note-taking, OneNote is a great way to organize your research and lecture notes in one place.
- Microsoft Teams is a chat tool designed specifically for meetings and documents that integrates well with the rest of the Office 365 productivity suite. It's ideal for outlining a project together with a team or communicating and sharing deliverables with project collaborators.
Office 365 Student Discount: Office 365 for Education gives students and teachers the full Office 365 suite, plus some education-centric bonus software, completely free—quite a steal, compared to the standard price of $99.99/year. This deal lasts as long as you remain working or studying at a qualified school.
Subscribe to Office 365's student plan.
Scrivener
Organize your papers, essays, and thesis
From outlining to drafting to citing your sources, Scrivener is a favorite among writers of all stripes when it comes to organizing, writing, and revising large and complicated writing projects. Scrivener offers core word processing functions—as well as a host of other features designed specifically for writers.
With a project "binder" that lets you organize documents in unlimited folders, a custom label and keyword system for outlining and revising, and automated backup paired with a three-keystroke "snapshot" feature that instantly saves old versions of your project—Scrivener is designed to be a comprehensive tool for your entire writing project. For students in particular, Scrivener offers a thesis template, smart footnotes, and source organization, as well as a tool that lets you store all your research offline right next to your draft.
Scrivener Student Discount: Scrivener offers a 15% discount for students and educators, so you'll only pay $35 for the Windows version, or $38.25 for the Mac version, versus the regular one-time purchase price of $40 and $45, respectively. This deal is available to high schoolers too, as long as you can provide proof of affiliation with your educational institution.
*Buy a Scrivener education license.*
Ulysses
Write without distraction in Markdown
Contrary to Scrivener, Ulysses is the powerful writing app that's almost as simple to use as your Mac's Notes app. But Ulysses is far more than a notes app. It's designed to help you track and organize references, research, drafts, and outlines—and then format and publish it all with a few clicks.
Drafting in Ulysses is much like in any other text editors, with a few extra customizable features as well as Markdown XL, a variant on the efficient Markdown formatting that makes adding links and images easier. Ulysses' organization system is fluid and flexible, allowing you to group and combine multiple documents and export them with customizable templates. It also has a customizable distraction-free writing mode that may help you avoid that next all-nighter.
Ulysses Student Discount: Ulysses offers students a six-month discounted subscription to Ulysses for $10.99 ($1.83/mo), versus their regular cost of $4.99/mo. After six months, you will need to pay the regular subscription price. High school students can also take advantage of this discount by providing a copy of their student ID to Ulysses.
Subscribe to Ulysses' student plan.
Best Software Discounts to Prepare You for Your Future Career
| App | Icon: | Use It To: | Discount Price: | Regular Price: |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adobe Creative Cloud |  |
Sharpen your design skills | $19.99/mo | $49.99/yr |
| Apple Pro Bundle |  |
Learn Apple's powerful suite of creative tools | $199.99 | $629.95/yr |
| Autodesk |  |
Teach yourself industry-leading software for 3D-design, engineering, and entertainment | Free license | $1,000+ per license |
| Prezi |  |
Create dynamic, animated presentations | Free; $7/mo | $7/mo; $19/mo |
| Github Student Developer Pack |  |
Access key developer environments and tools to learn coding | Cost varies | $400+ in value |
| Zapier |  |
Create automated workflows | Free | $20/mo |
Adobe Creative Cloud
Sharpen your design skills
With a repertoire of apps like Photoshop, InDesign, AfterEffects, Dreamweaver, and more, Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription offers powerful, top-of-the-line tools to creatives of all stripes. Most employers expect experience with Adobe tools if you plan to go into graphic or UX design, web development, or video editing—and odds are, you'll want to learn how to use Adobe's tools for your own projects, too.
Don’t let the price tag of Adobe’s top software scare you off learning these key tools for your future. To help students (from high school to graduate school) gain experience, Adobe offers a 60% discount on their Creative Cloud all-apps plan.
With this plan, you have unlimited access to It's the perfect way to start using Photoshop and more in your student work.
Adobe Student Discount: Adobe offers students and teachers access to 20+ desktop and mobile apps, free tutorials, and regular upgrades, for as long as you can verify your student status—all for only $19.99/month (versus Adobe’s usual price of $49.99/month). This discount applies to high schoolers and homeschoolers as well as college students.
Subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud's student plan.
Apple Pro Bundle
Learn Apple's powerful suite of creative tools
Adobe isn't the only one giving discounts on industry-leading creative software. Apple also offers student discounts on their most popular and powerful creative tools and key plug-ins for those programs.
The Apple Pro Bundle for Education includes Final Cut Pro X, Apple's film editing software; Logic Pro X for music production Motion 5, a motion graphics tool that plugs into Final Cut; Compressor 4, a Final Cut add-on that helps you encode and deliver Final Cut projects; and Mainstage 3, a plug-in for Logic Pro that's designed for live performance. It's a broad set of software that can help you start a multimedia career—or just make your student project videos look that much more professional.
Apple Pro Bundle Student Discount: Apple offer college students this software bundle for only $199.99, which includes five pieces of software valued at roughly $629.95. And since you're buying the licenses from Apple, this software is yours to keep after you graduate.
Buy Apple Pro Bundle for Education.
Autodesk
Teach yourself industry-leading software for 3D-design, engineering, and entertainment
What if you could get your hands on the visual effects software that produced 14+ Oscar winners? How about using the same software that top architects and engineers use to build and analyze skyscrapers, or that inventors use to create groundbreaking products? Autodesk gives students this opportunity—totally free.
Once you've verified your status as a student or educational establishment, you'll gain free access to 60+ industry-leading tools including AutoCAD, Maya, and more, along with lessons from Autodesk Design Academy, and specialized certification and training resources.
Autodesk Student Discount: Autodesk offers students free educational licenses for 60+ of Autodesk's top software programs, including Maya, AutoCAD, Inventor Pro, and many more—many of which cost $1,000+ per year. Any person enrolled at an accredited educational institution (be it high school, homeschool, or college), is eligible for this discount.
Claim your free Autodesk student licenses.
Prezi
Create dynamic, animated presentations
Prezi is to presentations as GIFs are to pictures—technically they’re the same format, but one is far more dynamic than the other. Prezi ditches the old conventions of the presentation and exchanges them for something far more interactive.
Built to be equally useful whether you’re a designer or not, Prezi features a slick suite of templates, design and animation tools, and a zoomable canvas. The format is meant to make presentations more dynamic in their movement, more interactive in their delivery, and better at highlighting relationships between points.
And Prezi isn’t just for the business world (although it will definitely boost your career in marketing or sales). Wow your students or professors with Prezi’s next-level animations and presentation style. Thanks to their education discount program, teachers and students can both get Prezi for free, or with a discount.
Prezi Student Discount: Prezi offers students their basic plan for free (usually $7/month). Prezi's EDU Plus Plan adds features like presenter notes, PDF export, and offline access features for $7/month (usually $19/month).
Subscribe to Prezi's student plan.
GitHub's Student Developer Pack
Access key developer environments and tools to learn coding
Coding skills have become one of the most highly-sought job skills in recent years, and often lead to some of the highest-paying careers. However, the tools and education needed to gain them are often cost-prohibitive. While code documentation, coding apps, and even example source code are often free today, the full stack of services you'd need to build your own app are often quite expensive.
To help students gain skills and real-world experience with top coding tools, GitHub created GitHub Education to help students learn coding and teachers teach coding more efficiently. Part of this program is GitHub’s Student Developer Pack, which gives students free or discounted access to some of the best developer tools on the market.
The pack includes over 20 developer and business tools, including Digital Ocean, SendGrid,, and Stripe—along with Microsoft Imagine's free copies of Windows Server and Visual Studio. However, unlike the other student discounts mentioned, the offers in this developer pack aside from Microsoft's are rarely long-term. Most tools offer a specific credit for use, waive certain usage fees, or offer a month of free access to additional education—enough to build a class project and learn how to use them in your upcoming career.
Even still, GitHub’s Student Developer Pack is a great way to get familiarized with some top tools without paying full price.
GitHub Student Discount: Prices are dependent on the specific apps within pack; see GitHub’s Education page for details. This pack is available to any student aged 13+ who is enrolled in a degree or diploma-granting course of study, provided you can provide official proof of enrollment.
Sign up for GitHub's Student Developer Pack.
Zapier
Create automated workflows
Zapier is an online automation tool that connects your favorite apps. Connect two or more apps to automate repetitive tasks without any coding knowledge required. Move info between your web apps automatically, so you can focus on your education and the skills you’ll be taking into your future career. It's easy enough that anyone can build their own app workflows with just a few clicks.
Zaps—our word for a workflow between two or more apps—start with a Trigger, an event in one of your apps that kicks off your workflow. Zapier then automates an Action that you specify. These workflows, or Zaps, work in the background, so you can focus on more important work.
You can use a pre-built Zap template to get started with a basic workflow more quickly, or you can create your own workflow from scratch! Either way: no coding skills required. You can even set up multiple apps in multiple steps, to automate even more work!
With Zapier’s library of 800+ integrated apps, you can easily automate your daily workload with just a few clicks. Here are just a few examples:
Get a lot of detailed or important emails from your professor? Save those details automatically into Evernote, OneNote, or even OmniFocus!
Taking notes in class and wishing your assignments could automatically show up in your to-do list or task management tool? Just use one of these Zaps (or build your own)!
Do marketing for your student organization? Zapier can lend a hand, from helping you automate social media, to managing forms and subscribers, to helping you curate your blog or newsletter.
Want to share notes or collaborate on documents with friends or classmates? Done.
Zapier Student Discount: Zapier offers students six months of access to Zapier’s premium features (more workflows, multi-step automations, premium apps) for free (compared to $20/mo).
Subscribe to Zapier's student plan.
Bonus Student Discounts
Amazon Prime
Free shipping on necessities and free video subscription
Tuition, textbooks, housing, food—your education already has a lot of costs associated with it. But unless you have the discipline of a Himalayan monk and are willing to survive on nothing but Ramen and studying, you’re going to need a little something extra now and again.
Amazon has you covered. To help mitigate these extra costs for students, Amazon offers verified students a free six-month subscription to Amazon Prime. This includes free two-day shipping on Prime items, and full access to Amazon Video and Twitch Prime.
Prime Student also features some exclusive discounts, such as their student discounts on Microsoft Surfaces, as well as a textbook program that will let you rent, buy, and sell your textbooks through Amazon.
Amazon Prime Student Discount: Free Prime membership for six months for verified students.
Sign up for Amazon Prime Student.
Spotify and Apple Music
Enjoy music; keep your sanity
Let’s be honest—amidst all the stress of college life, classes, homework, exams, and social commitments, it’s hard to get quality you-time. But even if you can’t carve out a lot of time for self care, listening to music should still make your priority list.
Thankfully, both Spotify and Apple Music have you covered with 50% discounts for students.
In addition to your favorite music, be sure to try Spotify’s carefully-curated playlists for goals such as Intense Studying and Deep Focus, or one of many Apple Music study mixes.
Apple Music and Spotify Student Discount: Both of these popular music streaming subscriptions offer verified students 50% off their subscriptions, putting both at only $4.99 (about the cost of a drink at Starbucks) per month.
Subscribe to Apple Music's student plan..
Subscribe to Spotify's student plan.
Computer Discounts
What good is great software without a good computer to support it? Check out these education discounts from leading manufacturers.
- Apple offers up to $300 off on new Macs and iPads, and is currently throwing in a pair of Beats headphones for free with a Mac or iPad Pro purchase.
- Microsoft offers students and educators 10% off all Surface notebooks, as well as discounts on some featured laptops.
- Lenovo gives a 15% discount off all products to students and teachers.
- Dell offers students and educators a number of perks through its Dell University program, including a loyalty rewards program, price-match guarantee, and a membership offer with 20% all Dell products.
- AT&T Signature Program works with some educational institutions to offer discounts to students and faculty. Check and see if your college is enrolled.
- Best Buy has a Student Deals section that offers exclusive coupons to students for featured products.
In addition to the discounts mentioned, sometimes certain universities will have access to additional or exclusive discounts with a software provider—MSDNAA, for instance, often offers free or cheap copies of Windows to students. (Take this example of student software discounts from University of Texas.) If your university has special offerings like this, you're most likely to find them on your university's IT department web page.
Even if you're unable to find a list like this on your university website, it's well worth your while to check with your student bookstore to see what software and hardware discounts are available to your university.
Want more tips to help you succeed in college? Here are some of our favorites:
- 20+ Productivity Apps for College Students and Young Professionals
- Ace College and Your Career with These 6 App Workflows
- How to Gather Research and Create a Bibliography in Google Docs
- Tagging Tips: How to Organize Files and Other Information with Tags
- Build the Perfect Productivity System with Paper Notebooks and Digital Tools
Photo by Michał Grosicki.
source https://zapier.com/blog/best-education-software-discounts/
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