Coding Bootcamp Students Can Get Over $200,000¹ Worth of Free Tools and Courses With This One Program

4 min readOct 19, 2022

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For every free programming resource out there, there is a prohibitively expensive one 🙄. Wouldn’t it be cool if you can access some of the latter without hurting the wallet? In this article, we’ll discuss a program that offers various benefits to students, including those not enrolling in an accredited institution. Looking at you, bootcamp folks! 👀

GitHub Student Developer Pack, a program by GitHub Global Campus, gives students, teachers, and schools access to tools and events they need to shape the next generation of software development.

Github Student Developer Pack Parners — Github Student Developer Pack Partners

As of the time of this writing, there are over 80+ products and services offered. These range from developer tools to like JetBrain and Heroku to learning tools like Thinkful and InterviewCake. Here’s a quick look at some of the offers:

JetBrain: A professional license costs around $249 per user annually. You’d get the annual student license for free.
Heroku: Starting Nov 28th, the free tier is going away but worry not, you can enjoy a credit of $13 per month for 12 months. No need to go back to doing demos on your local 😏
Thinkful: The 5-month web dev course costs over $9000 and you’d get one month free
InterviewCake: Free 3 weeks access to the entire course worth $149

The year was 2018, while looking into Educative.io, I stumbled on this list of courses that would become free magically if you have the Developer Pack (a value of over $2,000 for six months 🤑)! I immediately looked into how to get this golden ticket 🎫 but hit a bit of a blocker. The requirements state:

To be eligible for GitHub Global Campus, including GitHub Student Developer Pack and other benefits, you must:
- Be currently enrolled in a degree or diploma granting course of study such as a high school, secondary school, college, university, homeschool, or similar educational institution
- Have a verifiable school-issued email address or upload documents that prove your current student status
- Have a GitHub personal account
- Be at least 13 years old

Being out of college and not having a bootcamp-issued ID/email, I thought I was out of luck 😢. Desperate, I uploaded the bootcamp acceptance email and hope for the best. A few days later, this showed up in my inbox 💥 and the rest was history.

Github Student Developer Pack Approval — Acceptance Email

I hope you find a few tools to help you along this arduous coding journey. Happy coding, don’t go broke 💪

Obligatory tl;dr:

Step 1: Use your bootcamp acceptance email/completion certificate to apply for GitHub Student Developer Pack — It’s been brought to my attention that Github Education recently changed this to require the bootcamps to become partner before their students can get free access. Although that’s not ideal if you want immediate access, it makes sense that everyone chips in. Contact your bootcamp and tell them to participate!

Step 2: Score hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of resources