Free software development tools for students

For all institutions

You can get all of these if you're a student. It helps to have a .edu email address

  • JetBrains - a huge set of dev tools for most languages/platforms like Java, C#, Obj-C, PHP, Ruby, Python, and Ruby. They have really nice and easy-to-use IDEs like PyCharm and WebStorm that would normally cost a lot of money
  • Autodesk - A set of modeling utilities for engineering students.
  • GitHub Student Pack - a bunch of discounted/free stuff you can get due to company tie-ups with GitHub. Get AWS creds, DigitalOcean creds, Stripe discounts, a free .me domain, and lessons from Udacity.
  • Microsoft Imagine - discounted/free .NET-based technologies like Visual Studio and SQL Server
  • On The Hub - search for your school and find software that your school sponsors, often Windows 10 downloads, VMWare, etc.

For most institutions

Your school has probably told you about these already, but here goes anyway

  • IEEE Student Membership - A lot of schools give you IEEE memberships, allowing you to view some of the nation's best STEM research work for free, when it would otherwise cost you about $50 per paper.
  • MATLAB - a lot of schools, especially engineering colleges, sponsor a university-wide MATLAB license, allowing you to save thousands upon thousands of dollars
  • Microsoft Office - most schools sponsor free Microsoft Office for all of their students.
  • Google Drive - if your school has an educational Google Apps account, you have infinite storage (technically like 10 TB) on your account. You can save everything to your heart's content on that account.

For a few institutions

Just a few schools have these

  • Free Adobe Creative Cloud - some schools like UC Berkeley and Clemson have tie-ups with Adobe and can provide free Creative Cloud for their students.