The student software stack: what is free, and the four things worth paying for

2026-07-31 · Yusuf Gadelrab

Almost everything you are told to buy as a CS student is free for students, and most people never claim it because nobody hands you the list. I am going to hand you the list first, and only then talk about the small number of paid tools that survived a year of me being broke and suspicious.

Context on the "broke and suspicious" part: I budget in the tens of dollars, not hundreds. A $15 monthly subscription is a real decision for me. That constraint made me better at this than a review written by someone expensing it.

Claim these before you spend a dollar

• GitHub Student Developer Pack. The single highest-value thing on this page. Copilot, domains, hosting credit, and dozens of tools that would otherwise be paid. Takes ten minutes and proof of enrollment.
• JetBrains. The entire professional suite, free with a student email. People pay hundreds a year for this.
• Notion. Free for students on the education plan. Worth knowing: their affiliate program is closed to new applicants right now, so nobody linking it here is getting paid, which is a decent reason to trust the recommendation.
• Figma. Education plan, free.
• Cloud credits. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all run student programs. Enough to run a side project for a year.
• Your university's licenses. Check the IT page before buying anything. Mine covers office software, storage, and a VPN I would otherwise have paid for.
• Obsidian, VS Code, Zotero, LaTeX. Free for everyone, permanently, and better than several paid alternatives.

If you claim all of that, your remaining gaps are narrow. That is the point. Only shop for the gaps.

What I actually pay for

Writing that other people grade: Grammarly

This one earned it in a specific way I did not expect. Not spelling, which your editor already handles. The value is in things that get you marked down without you knowing why: clause structure that runs long, tone that reads wrong in an email to a professor, and the hedging phrases that make a strong claim sound uncertain.

I write research papers and cold emails, and English is one of two languages I grew up with, so I am not the maximum-value user. If you are writing academically in a second language, the free tier of Grammarly alone is worth installing today, and the paid tier is a defensible upgrade at the point where something graded is on the line.

The one caution I would give a CS student: do not let it flatten your voice. A cover letter optimized into perfect neutral corporate English is a worse cover letter.

Mac utilities without buying them one at a time: Setapp

The arithmetic here is the whole argument. If you would otherwise buy three or four Mac utilities outright, a bundle is cheaper. If you would buy zero, Setapp is a subscription you will forget you have, which is the standard failure mode of every bundle ever sold.

Do the honest test: write down the specific apps you would use this month. If the list is under three, skip it. There is also a student discount, so check that before paying full price.

Calendars that fight back: Motion

I am genuinely torn on this one and I would rather say so than pretend.

The pitch for Motion is automatic scheduling: it takes your tasks and deadlines and places them into real calendar blocks, then moves them when you inevitably fail to do them on time. For someone juggling classes, a research lab, a club officer role, and side projects, that is a real problem being solved.

The counterargument is that it is priced for professionals, not for students, and that a free calendar plus a written weekly plan gets you most of the way. My actual advice: try the free trial during your worst week of the semester, not your calmest. If it does not save you during midterms it will not save you in March.

Structured data without a database: Airtable

The moment a spreadsheet gets relationships in it, it wants to be a database, and Airtable is the shortest path there for a non-engineer collaborator.

I used this pattern running technical operations for an entrepreneurship club. Sponsors, contacts, events, and status all related to each other, and the club officers after me needed to maintain it without knowing SQL. Handing over a working base beats handing over a schema and an apology.

Its free tier is generous and it is what most students should stay on. Pay only when you hit the record limit on something that has real stakes.

The rule I use, since I have to

A subscription has to replace a specific hour I am currently losing, and I have to be able to name the hour.

"It seems useful" is not naming the hour. "I spend forty minutes every Sunday rebuilding my week by hand" is. The second one justifies a purchase and gives you a cancellation test: if you stop losing that hour for a reason unrelated to the tool, cancel it.

Second rule: cancel on a calendar, not on a feeling. When I start a trial I put the cancel date in the calendar the same minute. Every subscription I have ever regretted was one I intended to evaluate later.

The free tools I built because I was not paying for them

Being broke is a decent product manager. Everything below is free, needs no account, and works offline, because I built each one after refusing to pay for something:

• Fire, a daily ritual checklist, because habit apps wanted a subscription to draw a streak.
• Cut, a weight and body tracker, same reason.
• TradeLog, an R-multiple trading journal, because journaling software for traders is priced as if traders are all profitable.
• DIRA, a zero-dependency security scanner.
• Risk tools, including a position sizer that refuses to let you round up.

All of them install to a phone home screen through the browser share menu, no App Store involved, which I wrote about in the PWA piece.