AI coding tools for students, compared: the real discounts, the free tiers, and the dead ends

The short answer: which AI coding discount wins

Four live offers, four different shapes. Here is the honest comparison before the details:

Replit: $15 off Core for six months

Replit's official student discount takes $15 off per month for the first six months of Core, its paid individual plan, when you sign up with a student email. The discount applies automatically: no coupon, no application form. Replit announced the program as live in its official changelog and confirms it in its pricing help docs, with no region restriction and no published end date.

The math is strong. Core lists at $20 a month, so the discount brings it to $5 a month for half a year: $90 back in total. Core buys you the full AI-assisted workflow: AI integrations across the editor, Plan mode, unlimited workspaces, and $20 of credit toward more powerful models each month.

Diary month seven: the discount covers the first six months only, and the plan renews at the regular rate afterwards. If $5 a month is still a stretch, Replit's free tier (up to 30 hours of chat on Free Mode and up to 60 projects, no card) covers most coursework on its own.

GitHub Copilot: free for your whole degree

The deepest offer on this list is GitHub Copilot's Student plan: verified students get it free for as long as they stay enrolled, through GitHub Education. At Copilot Pro's $10-a-month list price, that is about $120 a year of value, every year until graduation.

The plan gives you unlimited code completions and next-edit suggestions plus 200 AI credits a month for chat and agent usage. Read the plan name carefully, though: since March 2026 this is a dedicated Student plan, not full Copilot Pro. Models are served through automatic selection only; you cannot pick premium models yourself, and third-party agents are excluded.

Verification runs through GitHub Education with a school email or uploaded documents, and eligibility is re-checked monthly. One practical warning from the official docs: verification and benefit activation are separate steps, and the Copilot benefit can take several days to finish applying. If the activation page shows only paid options, do not buy. Wait and retry.

Cursor: one free month, but hurry

Cursor has no standing student discount we could verify, but it has the most time-sensitive live offer of the four: register free for MLH's Global Hack Week and MLH emails you a promo code for one month of Cursor Pro at $0 (the $20 tier). No student verification and no hackathon participation are required.

One honesty note before the deadline: the Cursor perk itself is community-reported. The offer surfaced on X, and while MLH's public event page confirms Global Hack Week: Hacktoberfest runs October 9-15, 2026, it does not spell out the promo code, the email delivery, or the no-verification eligibility. Treat the code as very likely but not officially guaranteed, and if the email does not arrive within 24 hours, check spam first, then write to hi@mlh.io.

The deadline is the whole story here. Registration closes when the event ends on October 15, 2026, and the code typically takes up to 24 hours to arrive, so October 14 is the practical last day. Redeem the code in Cursor's billing settings, then manually upgrade to Pro to activate the credits. Watch the checkout total: regional taxes above the credit can land on your card.

Cursor also runs a limited 50%-off-first-month referral program, but it has no public link we could verify, so we do not list it as claimable. If the MLH window closes, there is currently no verified Cursor student route; the free tier is the fallback.

Bolt.new: free tokens every day, no card

Bolt.new takes a different route entirely: instead of a student program, every free account gets 300,000 AI tokens a day (1 million a month cap, roughly 3-8 prompts a day), resetting every 24 hours, with no credit card required. For a student prototyping a class project or a weekend build, the free allocation alone often covers the work.

New users additionally get 20% off a monthly plan for the first three months, applied automatically through the referral link (not a student offer), but worth knowing if you outgrow the daily tokens. There is no published end date on either the free tokens or the new-user discount.

Which one should you pick

For a full degree, start with GitHub Copilot: it is free for years, not months, and unlimited completions are the feature that saves the most time while learning. Stack it with Bolt.new's daily free tokens for prototyping outside your IDE.

For the next six months of serious building, Replit's $5-a-month window is the cheapest way onto a full paid plan. And if you want to try Cursor Pro, do it this week: the MLH free month ends October 15 and there is no verified student route after it.

For the wider picture beyond coding tools, our student AI discounts roundup covers every verified offer, and our student verification guide walks through the SheerID and school-email checks these offers use.

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