The Privilege of Being a Student in Tech

Mar 15, 2026

I know this has been said too many times on X, but If you're a student right now studying anything remotely related to tech, you are sitting on what might be the most generous ecosystem of free tools any industry has ever offered. A

As a student, you can walk into your university email, verify your status, and walk out with access to professional software that companies pay thousands of dollars a year for.

A working professional in marketing, law, or medicine does not get handed free tools just because they're learning. In tech, you do. And to me that to be honest is a privilege to me.

The free tools you're sleeping on

Here's a breakdown of what you can get right now with a student email:

GitHub Student Developer Pack This is the biggest one. Free domains from Namecheap, cloud credits from DigitalOcean and Azure, free access to JetBrains IDEs, Frontend Masters (where I learned everything I know about coding), and literally 100+ tools at zero cost.

Notion Education Plan Notion's Plus plan, the one teams pay $10/month for, is completely free for students. Unlimited file uploads, unlimited blocks, and all the collaboration features. Your entire second brain, free. I actually build all GooGuider's Notion templates with dashboards with this. Can't thank Ivan and the team for this.

Figma Education The full Figma professional plan. It offers unlimited projects, Dev Mode, full collaboration and moreUnlimited projects, Dev Mode, full collaboration. Design agencies pay $15/editor/month for this and you can get it for the price of an .edu email. I am so grateful to Dylan and the team at Figma for this. I would not have learned UI design without this.

Claude Student Ambassador Anthropic runs a student ambassador program that gives students access to Claude and grants up to $10,000 in API credits which is the equivalent of ten thousand dollars in AI compute, just because you're a student and can inspire your classmates to use Claude.

JetBrains All Products Pack Every single JetBrains IDE, IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm, DataGrip, all of them, free with a student license. Professionals pay $649/year for this bundle.

And I haven't even mentioned Vercel's hobby plan, 1Password student access, Canva Education, the Google Cloud student credits, or the dozens of other programs scattered across the ecosystem.

No other industry does this

Think about this for a second. If you're a law student, nobody gives you free access to Westlaw or LexisNexis, which I wanted so badly during my sophomore year in the Law school. And same is true for medicine, engineering (wait, actually Autodesk does offer student licenses for architecture students) and most of the other fields. A 19-year-old student in Mogadishu has access to the same development tools as a senior engineer at Google. That doesn't happen in most industries.

Yeah, looking from a business perspective, part of these offers are because to get you hooked on the platform, but with or without these offers you were going to use these toolsin work anyway. So the point still stands..

The real privilege

Even though these offers are privileges, the real privilege is the signal they send: This is an industry of builders and it wants you to build things before you're "ready."

Nobody in tech waits for you to graduate to take you seriously. A medical student can't perform surgery. A law student can't represent clients in court. But a CS student, or honestly, any student who puts in efforts can ship a product, launch a startup, contribute to open source, and build a portfolio that matters. And not with AI it is even way better..

What to do about it

If you're a student reading this, here's what I tell my school mates: sign up for everything. Today, start claiming these tools. Set up Notion as your knowledge base. Get Figma and start designing. Apply to the Claude Student Ambassador program and get those API credits.

Build things. Break things. Ship things. That is what matters, and that is what employers value anyway. If you do not trust me, check this web by Replit: viberoles.com.

Five years from now, many of these programs may tighten up or disappear like what happened last week with Copilot's Opus and GPT 5.4 plans.

This article, this website, and everything on 24bruv.com was built using some of these tools. That's the point. The tools exist. Go build something. If you are not in the mood, go watch this one hour video of Travis.