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.

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 :-(

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Why use github if you can do it youself?

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

$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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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..

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.

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.

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

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.

(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.)

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.