Despite college being (potentially) some of the best years of your life, it can be hard to enjoy it if you’re scrounging every dollar for books, supplies, food and, if you’re lucky, the occasional outing with friends. But there is a silver lining: student discounts. While it seems like good discounts can be harder and harder to find for the rest of us, students can find them fairly easily if they know where to look. We’ve collected the best student discounts we could find on useful services, along with some things you’ll enjoy in your down time. Just keep in mind that most of these offers require you to prove your status as a student either by signing up with your .edu email address or providing a valid student ID.
If you’re not piggybacking off of your parents’ Amazon Prime account, you can have the subscription for less while you’re in school. College students can get Prime Student for free for six months, then it costs only $69 per year, and the membership includes the same perks as regular Prime does, including free two-day shipping, free same-day delivery in select areas, and access to the entire Prime Video library. Amazon also recently added additional benefits including free Grubhub food delivery and discounted subscription prices for Prime Video add-on channels like Shudder and MGM+.
While it doesn’t offer a specific student discount, Best Buy has a student deal hub page where you can find gadgets on sale. You’ll find discounts on a bunch of gear that students would need, including laptops, headphones, monitors, software and more. Best Buy also has a tool that will help students find the right computer for their needs that only requires them to answer a few questions before providing them a number of options.
Apple offers deals to students and educators in the form of knocking down the prices of its most popular laptops and tablets. There isn’t a flat percentage rate across all products; the discounts vary by device. For example, right now students can get a MacBook Air M3 starting at $999, which is $100 less than the normal starting price, and the latest iPad Airs start at $549, which represents a $50 discount. These are decent savings if you must have a brand new Apple product, but those with tighter budgets should also consider Apple’s refurb program. The iPhone maker is also offering up to a $150 gift card when you purchase a qualifying Mac or iPad for college.
Much like Apple, Samsung doesn’t offer a blanket discount across all of its products for students. But you can save depending on what you’re looking to buy if you sign up for its Education Offers Program, which only requires you to verify your student status with your .edu email address.
Microsoft also provides students and educators with up to and additional 10 percent off its gadgets, including most of its Surface family. And the online store doesn’t only sell Microsoft-made devices: You can also find Windows PCs from Lenovo, HP, Acer and others there at discounted prices.
Unidays is one of the best places on the Internet to go to find student discounts of all shapes and sizes. It collects information from all sorts of retailers and brands, including Apple, Adobe, Hulu, Logitech, Casetify and more, about their most recently discounts for students. Signing up for a free Unidays account will give you access to exclusive discounts that the company has worked out with some brands as well, and with their mobile app, you can get some in-store discounts as well.
Similar to Unidays, Student Beans is another aggregator of student discounts. Signing up for an account will get you access to a library of online and in-store student savings, including ones from Hulu, Samsung, NordVPN, Acer, Temu and others. Student Beans also makes it very clear when discounts are available for a limited time only, which will make it easier to not miss the ones you really care about.
Streaming
Spotify Premium’s student plan gives you full, ad-free access to the music streaming service plus a subscription to the ad-supported Hulu plan for only $5 per month. This has been one of the best student discounts in the streaming space for some time, and the fact that students get the first month for free makes it even better.
Apple slashes 50 percent off its Apple Music subscription for students, bringing it down to $5 per month. The offer is available for up to 48 months so you can enjoy the rate for the entirety of your college experience. What’s more, the company bundles Apple TV+ in this student offer, so you can watch Apple originals like Severance.
Pandora offers students its Premium membership for $6 per month. Pandora’s offering doesn’t include any additional services, but you do get an ad-free experience, personalized music, unlimited skips and unlimited offline play. Plus, you’ll get 60 days of free use before the payments kick in.
Tidal provides student discounts on all of its services — eligible high school and college students can get up to 50 percent off its subscription plans. Tidal is still often overshadowed by Spotify and Apple Music, but these discounts are a good way to give it a try without spending too much money.
College students can sign up for Hulu’s ad-supported plan for only $2 per month. That’s $6 less than the normal price and a great deal considering all of the content that Hulu has to offer (think: The Bear, Grey’s Anatomy, Rick & Morty and more). Yes, you have to deal with commercials, but it’s a small price to pay to binge-watch shows like Brooklyn Nine Nine, which can provide a much-needed laugh when you’re drowning in coursework.
Peacock’s student discount gives you one year of access for $2 per month, which comes out to only $24 for the year. That’s $4 less than the standard rate and a great offer if you like to binge-watch shows like The Office, New Girl and Vanderpump Rules in your free time.
Paramount+’s student discount knocks 25 percent off the Essentials monthly plan, so you’ll end up paying around $3.75 per month for access to the service’s content with limited commercials. With this subscription, you can watch shows like Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, South Park, RuPaul’s Drag Race and more, but just keep in mind that this particular plan doesn’t include access to your local CBS station.
Being a student is stressful even in the best of times, but now it’s even more difficult to concentrate and find peace. Headspace is just one of many meditation and mindfulness apps available that can help with that, but it stands apart with an excellent student discount: $10 for the entire year, or $60 less than a normal annual membership. In addition to a large library of meditation lessons and routines to follow, Headspace recently added SleepCasts, a collection of soothing voices reading bedtime stories to help you fall asleep, as well as “mindful” workout routines.
You’re probably using Adobe products if you’re studying anything related to digital art or design. Adobe Creative Cloud is the industry standard in this space but the entire suite of programs is quite expensive at $53 per month. Thankfully, Adobe has education pricing for students that drops the entire creative suite to $20 per month for the first year. That includes the big programs like Photoshop CC and Illustrator CC along with Lightroom CC, Premiere Pro CC, Adobe XD and more.
After your first year, the monthly cost increases to $35 per month. While not ideal, it’s still more affordable for students than it is for industry professionals. If you’re not tied to Adobe programs, you might also consider Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher apps from Serif ($70 each for the Mac or Windows versions), which compete with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, respectively.
Many students have to use Microsoft 365 tools on the regular. If your college or university doesn’t provide you with an account, you can still get Microsoft 365 for free by taking advantage of the company’s student and educator discount. This gives you access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and even Microsoft Teams free of charge, which is a solid deal considering an annual subscription costs $100.
ExpressVPN doesn’t have a specific student discount, but you can check its deals and coupons page to see the discounts currently on offer. At the moment, you can save a total of 49 percent on a one-year plan at $6.69/per month, plus an extra three months for free.
One of our favorite VPNs, Surfshark offers 79 percent off for students plus two months free when you sign up for a two-year plan. You can connect an unlimited number of devices to one Surfshark account, which will be good for students who want access across their phone, laptop, smart TV, and other gadgets. It also has more than 3,200 servers that you can access across 100 countries, giving you plenty of connection options.
Dashlane offers one year of its Premium plan for free to all students with a valid university email address. It’s one of our top picks in our best password managers guide thanks to its easy to use apps and its focus on secure sharing. The latter could be particularly useful for students if they have friends and roommates with which they need to share account credentials.
Aspiring developers can sign up for GitHub’s Student Developer Pack, which includes discounts and resources that developers can use to learn, create projects and more. GitHub partnered with a bunch of companies including Educative, Canva, Namecheap, Bootstrap Studio and others to offer students access to many of the services they’ll need as the expand their skills.
Spending all day and night writing papers is even more frustrating when you don’t have all your writing organized in one place. Ulysses is a popular writing app for mac/iOS that can be used for note taking as well as thesis writing, with features like auto-save and auto-backup, word-count writing goals, markup, plain text support and DropBox integration. Normally, Ulysses costs $40 per year but students can get it for only $11 every six months, or $22 per year. There isn’t a direct alternative for Windows users, but you do have options including Scrivener, IA Writer and FocusWriter.
Whether you’re itching to get a jump-start on your portfolio or just want an online space to show off your work, Squarespace is a good option as it gives students a 50 percent discount on any of its annual plans for the first year. Squarespace is one of many website builders out there, but it’s particularly popular with creative professionals. Its customizable templates make it easy to build a website and make it look exactly how you want it. Plus, you can upgrade down the line to add things like website analytics, custom JavaScript and CSS and e-commerce.
Regardless of whether you’re studying music production, students can get 60 percent off Ableton Live Standard or Suite for as long as they are enrolled full-time. That brings Live 12 Standard down to $175 and Suite down to $299 — great discounts on some of the best music software available right now.
News
You shouldn’t rely on social media to be your sole source of news. With foreign wars, new viruses, Supreme Court decisions and upcoming elections making headlines daily, it’s important to get your news from reliable sources. Yes, it’s daunting to get into the news on a regular basis, but it’s crucial to know what’s going on in the country and the world as a whole. Here are some reputable news organizations that offer student discounts on their monthly or annual subscription plans.
The Atlantic: Starts at $45 per year for digital-only access.
The New York Times: $6 every four weeks for a base subscription.
The Washington Post: $1 every four weeks for digital-only access.
The Wall Street Journal: Starting at $4 every four weeks for the WSJ Digital pack.
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