The best student discounts we found for 2023

Your college years can be some of the best of your life, but we know it can be tough to enjoy them when you’re scrounging every dollar for textbooks, food and (if you’re lucky) the occasional outing with friends. Money is tight when you’re a student, and that financial stress can be compounded by the reality of having to stay on top of your studies.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s student discounts. Many companies offer their products and apps for less to those struggling through lectures, writing term papers and studying for finals. We’ve compiled a list of the best deals you can get 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 some form of student identification.
Shopping
Amazon Prime Student
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 $7.49 per month after that. That comes out to about $90 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.
Best Buy
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
Apple offers some 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 M1 starting at $899, which is $100 less than the normal starting price, and the iPad Pros start at $749, 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. Also for 2023, students can get up to a $150 gift card and 20 percent off AppleCare when they purchase a qualifying Mac or iPad, and they’ll get one month free of Apple Music and Apple TV+ as well.
Shop Apple’s back-to-school promos
Samsung
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. For example, you can save hundreds on the latest Galaxy S23 and foldable smartphones, up to $300 on Samsung Galaxy Book laptops and an extra 15 percent off Samsung wireless earbuds,
Shop Samsung’s back-to-school promos
Microsoft
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.
Shop Microsoft’s back-to-school promos
Streaming
Spotify
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 is a great discount considering you’d pay roughly $18 per month if you were to buy each service separately.
Pandora
Pandora also offers students its Premium membership for $5 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 your payments kick in.
Apple Music
Apple also 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 Ted Lasso and Severance.
Buy Apple Music Student membership
Paramount+
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.
Tidal
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.
Hulu
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 Handmaid’s Tale, 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.
Buy Hulu (ad-supported) for students
Headspace
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.
Tools
Adobe Creative Cloud
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 $30 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.
Ableton Live
Regardless of whether you’re studying music production, students can get 40 percent off Ableton Live Standard or Suite for as long as they are enrolled full-time. That brings Live 11 Standard down to $269 and Suite down to $449 — great discounts on some of the best music software available right now.
Microsoft 365
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.
Ulysses
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.
Evernote
Evernote can be an indispensable tool if you like to keep all of your thoughts in one place — everything from class notes to web clippings to to-do lists. Students can get 40 percent off Professional, which is the way to go because it syncs your notes across unlimited devices, gives you offline access, lets you annotate PDFs and search saved documents.
Github Student Developer Pack
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.
Get Github Student Developer Pack
Squarespace Student plan
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.
Surfshark
One of our favorite VPNs, Surfshark offers 83 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.
NordVPN
NordVPN’s student discount gives you two years of the service for less than $80. Like most of the top picks in our VPN guide, NordVPN offers access to thousands of servers in a number of countries, and you can connect from almost any device you could imagine. It also has a kill-switch feature that will prevent you from making unprotected connections should the VPN accidentally drop.
Dashlane
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.
NordPass
Another one of our favorite password managers, NordPass offers students a two-year Premium plan for just over $40, plus an extra month for free. Its wide platform compatibility makes it a great pick if you’re always logging in from different devices. You can stay logged in on up to six devices simultaneously, and it has browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Opera.
News
You shouldn’t rely on Twitter 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.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/best-student-discounts-140038070.html?src=rss
Your college years can be some of the best of your life, but we know it can be tough to enjoy them when you’re scrounging every dollar for textbooks, food and (if you’re lucky) the occasional outing with friends. Money is tight when you’re a student, and that financial stress…
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