Cursor Pro Plan for Students and Education: The Discount Ended, What's Free Now (2026)

What's free for students now, by situation

Cursor, GitHub, Google and OpenAI each give students something free for coding with AI this year. What you can claim depends on your age, your level of study and your country.

If you're unsure: start with Cursor's free plan and Copilot Student, GitHub's free AI coding assistant.

Why: Cursor's plan needs no proof that you study. Copilot Student takes students aged 13 or older, has no deadline, and adds code suggestions and chat inside your code editor.

Unless you are 18 or older at a college or university in the US: then start with Google AI Pro, normally a paid plan, free for 12 months if you claim it by 31 December 2026. It raises the limits of Antigravity, a code editor where AI agents edit files and run commands, as in Cursor.

Want an app built by chat, without a code editor? Lovable alternatives compares Lovable, an app builder you drive by chat, with the others and their free plans.

Is Cursor free for students? What ended on 25 June 2026

The only free Cursor access open to every student is its limited free plan. Credits and Campus Leads, its ambassador program, have conditions. What ended is the free year of Pro, which was Cursor's main paid plan.

The offer began in May 2025. Verified students could use Pro for twelve months without paying, which saved $240 at its price of $20 a month. They proved their status through SheerID, a company that checks student status for brands, using their school email address. Only students at universities in some countries qualified, a limit Cursor said was there "to ensure this system is not abused".

On 25 June 2026 Cursor stopped accepting new students. Its help page gives the reason: "The program had become a target for fraud and held Cursor back from reaching students globally." Anyone who had already redeemed the offer keeps it until their free year ends.

The offer had been shrinking for a year before that. That is why videos and posts from 2025 contradict each other, and contradict Cursor today.

The free year can no longer be claimed, whatever an older video promises.

The plans themselves changed after that. SpaceX bought Cursor in August 2026, and SpaceX's AI lab makes Grok, an AI model. On 12 October 2026 Cursor's plans became part of The X Subscription, one subscription for Cursor, Grok and X, the social network. That is why today's plans and models differ from those in older pages.

Cursor for students: is there a Cursor student plan?

No. None of Cursor's plans has a student price on its pricing page. Cursor Pro, the plan behind the free year, isn't on that page either, because new customers can no longer buy it. A student who never had the free year still has these ways in: the free plan, a plan at the normal price, Campus Leads, and credits, at events for undergraduates and by form for master's and PhD students.

The free plan is open to everyone. It needs no student check. It gives limited use of three features. Agent edits files and runs commands for you. Chat answers questions about your code. Tab finishes the code you are typing.

It runs only what Cursor's help page calls "Cursor models". Composer is a fast coding model Cursor built. Grok comes from SpaceX's AI lab, and SpaceX owns Cursor, so Cursor now counts Grok as its own. Claude and GPT aren't available on it. Claude is Anthropic's family of AI models, and GPT is OpenAI's.

Cursor publishes no number for the limit: its pricing page says only "Limited". When the free allowance runs out, expect the AI features to stop until it refills. Cursor says that of Hobby, its older free plan, and its help page says Hobby works the same way as Free. The pricing page says allowances refill every week.

Paid plans cost students the normal price. All of them belong to The X Subscription. All include unlimited Tab, Cursor's staff say. Prices exclude tax. Each plan includes an allowance, a set amount of AI use, which refills every week.

An API price is the per-use rate a model's maker charges developers. It is counted in tokens, the chunks of text a model reads and writes. Prepaid credit is money you load onto the account in advance.

The cheapest plan may not suit a student. It has the smallest allowance and no Claude or GPT. Cursor's pricing page says Plus "is recommended for social creators with limited AI usage", and it recommends Premium "for new AI users".

Event credits go to undergraduates. Cursor's students page tells them to "look out for promotions at our on-campus and online events starting this fall". To hear about those events, join its campus newsletter, which promises early access to events and discounts. Cursor doesn't say what those discounts are.

Fiona Whittington, Cursor's Campus Community Lead, announced these events on 25 June 2026, the day the discount closed. Cursor is opening its San Francisco and New York offices to academic events. It is also adding workshops and credits with Major League Hacking (MLH), a community that runs student hackathons. Cursor publishes no credit amounts, so you can't plan on a set amount.

Campus Leads trades Cursor Ultra for your time. Campus Leads is Cursor's ambassador program for current university students. They run workshops and meetups for about 5 hours a week. In return they get six months of Cursor Ultra, its $200-a-month plan, a trip to Cursor's San Francisco office and money for campus events.

The program runs in the fall and the spring. Cursor's page says applications reopen in January, and people on the interest list are told.

Accounts from resellers can be shut down. Searches such as "buy cursor student account" lead to resellers. Cursor's pricing page says it authorizes none, and that accounts bought elsewhere "may be suspended or terminated at any time."

Cursor education: credits for graduate students, researchers and teachers

Cursor has no education plan or education price either. Graduate students, researchers and teachers can ask for credits. Events have their own form, and a public course is open to anyone.

You ask for academic credits with a form. Master's students, PhD candidates, academic researchers and educators use the academic credits form to ask for credits "to support their work". Cursor publishes no amounts. Explain the project behind your request: a thesis, a lab or a course.

A class or an event has its own form. A student group or a teacher uses the event request form to ask for credits or support for a workshop. In July 2026 an instructor in India, planning a workshop for 250 students, filled in the academic form first. Cursor's staff sent the instructor to the event form. It seemed limited to a couple of cities, the instructor reported, and they filled it in anyway. The outcome isn't public.

Cursor Learn is a course anyone can open. Cursor Learn teaches how to write software with AI models, using Cursor for its examples. Its page shows no price and asks for no student check. It doesn't cover machine learning or training your own models.

Already on the free year: what renewal really costs

Your free year stays free until it ends. Then Cursor charges $20 a month until you cancel. Cursor's help page says: "Your subscription continues at the regular rate for your plan unless you cancel." That rate is the price of legacy Pro, the plan you are on. Cursor sold legacy Pro before The X Subscription and keeps it only for people already on it.

The free year was never a separate student plan. Cursor's staff explained at launch that it was a coupon taking $20 off a normal monthly Pro subscription for 12 months, with a card on file. That is why your account shows a monthly Pro plan. It is also why, at the end, "your plan will automatically renew using the attached card."

So you have a decision to make before your free year ends. Your renewal date is on cursor.com/dashboard/billing, and you cancel from that page too. Its Manage in Stripe button opens the billing portal of Stripe, the company that handles Cursor's card payments. You have three choices:

Three rules decide which choice works for you:

• Leaving is one-way. Colin, a Cursor support engineer, wrote on its forum on 20 October 2026 that "legacy plans can't be repurchased once they end."
• Switching rules out Plus. A paid account that switches is offered Premium and above. Your free year is a Pro subscription with a coupon, so expect this to apply to you. To reach Plus, cancel first. Once Pro has ended you are a free account, and The X Subscription's eligibility page says "you stay free until you choose a paid plan."
• Switching during the free year cancels it. Cursor cancels your current plan at checkout, with a refund for unused time. On a free year, that refund comes to nothing.

Keeping legacy Pro pays off only if you use other companies' models. Cursor doesn't publish the size of its allowances, so here is one example month. It uses Claude Sonnet 5.5, Anthropic's mid-range model. In Cursor that model costs $2 per million tokens read and $10 per million written. An agent request that reads 50,000 tokens of your code and writes 2,000 costs about $0.12: $0.10 for reading and $0.02 for writing. A hundred of those come to about $12 in a month.

• Premium costs $42 that month. The $12 of Claude comes on top of the $30 plan.
• Legacy Pro costs $32 at most. The $12 comes first out of its Other Models allowance. Cursor bills only what goes over that allowance, at the same rates, on top of the $20.

Legacy Pro saves at least $10 in that month, as long as your work on Cursor's own models also fits in its allowance. If you rarely pick Claude or GPT, legacy Pro gives you little more than the free plan or Plus. In that case, cancel in the last month of the free year, which costs nothing.

Copilot Student: the free plan most students can get

Copilot Student is the usual fallback for students who missed Cursor's free year. GitHub Copilot is an AI assistant that works inside code editors such as VS Code. GitHub, the Microsoft-owned site where people store and share code, makes it. Students verified through GitHub Education, its program for students and teachers, get it free. The plan shrank during 2026, so check what it buys today.

Teachers verified by GitHub Education get more than students do: GitHub's student FAQ says they keep free access to Copilot Pro.

Since 1 June 2026 GitHub has counted use in AI credits. Each chat answer or agent task, a job the AI carries out on its own, uses credits according to the model and the number of tokens it handles. One credit is worth one US cent.

"Automatic" means GitHub's Auto mode picks the model for every request. It chooses among many models, from cheap lightweight ones up to Claude Opus, one of Anthropic's most powerful. GitHub's changelog says the choice is "subject to plan restrictions", and GitHub doesn't say which models a student gets. So the cost of a question depends on Auto's pick.

Here is what 200 credits buy at GitHub's published prices, on two of those models. Take a question that sends 8,000 tokens, meaning your question and an open file of a couple of hundred lines, and gets 800 tokens back.

On Claude Sonnet 5.5, the 8,000 tokens cost $0.016 and the 800 cost $0.008. That makes 2.4 cents, so 2.4 credits. To count the tokens in your own text, paste it into the AI token calculator.

An agent task costs far more. One that reads 300,000 tokens across its steps and writes 15,000 costs $0.60 plus $0.15 on Claude Sonnet 5.5. That makes $0.75, or 75 credits, so two or three such tasks use up the month. Text the model has already seen is billed at a lower "cached" rate, so real costs can come in under these figures.

The plan changed five times in 2026:

GitHub's student FAQ still showed a notice about the April pause on 4 November 2026, more than four months after the reopening began. GitHub's setup page, checked the same day, describes turning on Copilot Student with no mention of a pause. So the notice looks out of date: apply anyway. If Copilot Student isn't offered to you after approval, ask GitHub Support rather than paying for a plan.

GitHub checks the following when you apply, and missing one can get you rejected:

• Be 13 or older and enrolled. Your program must lead to a degree or diploma. High school, college, university and homeschool all count.
• Add your school email first. If your school issues addresses, add and verify yours on your GitHub account. Once recent applicants from your school have used a school address, GitHub requires one from you too.
• Show dated proof. Send your student ID, a transcript, a letter confirming your enrollment or your class schedule. It must show your first and last name, the full school name and a current date. A school logo doesn't replace the full name. You can photograph several documents together.
• Apply from near your campus. GitHub compares your location with your school's, so let the browser share it and turn off any VPN, a service that hides where you are. Distance learners attach dated proof that their program is a distance one.
• Update your account after a rejection. Before applying again, fill in your billing information and turn on two-factor authentication, a code asked for at each login. GitHub's FAQ asks for both although the plan is free.
• Take a fresh photo if asked. If told your proof "has already been used", take a live picture of it instead of uploading a file.

To claim Copilot Student:

1. Create a free GitHub account if you have none, then add your school email and get your proof ready.
2. Open github.com/settings/education/benefits and click "Start an application" to apply to GitHub Education. GitHub says applications take a few days, and longer when a semester begins. Microsoft's walk-through from August 2026 says about 3 days.
3. Wait for the benefits to arrive, usually within 72 hours of approval. GitHub emails you when they do.
4. Go back to the benefits page. Under "Free GitHub developer resources for students and teachers", click "Learn more" and follow the prompts to turn on Copilot Student. The direct address is github.com/github-copilot/free_signup.
5. Install a code editor such as VS Code, which is free, and sign in with your GitHub account.

Three things catch people out:

• Approval is not activation. GitHub warns that the benefit can take several days to apply. Until then, your account can show Copilot Free, a trial or a checkout page. GitHub's instruction is "If only paid options appear, do not complete a purchase." Wait a few days, then contact GitHub Support if it lasts.
• Upgrading is one-way. You can move from Student to paid Pro and keep the rest of the Student Developer Pack, GitHub's bundle of free offers for students. But GitHub's FAQ says "downgrading will take you to a Free plan and you will need to reapply for Student plan."
• Eligibility is rechecked every month. The plan ends once you stop qualifying as a student.

Verified students also get GitHub Codespaces, a code editor in the browser connected to a machine in the cloud. It gives about 90 hours a month on the smallest machine. GitHub counts that as 180 "core hours", and that machine uses 2 an hour. Replit alternatives covers it with the other free places to write and run code.

Other free student offers in 2026: Google, OpenAI, JetBrains

Three other companies give students free AI help with code this year, each with its own deadline or limit.

Antigravity is free for adults, and Google AI Pro raises its limits. Antigravity is Google's code editor, built around AI agents that plan, write and check code across the editor, the terminal (the window where you type commands) and a browser. Its free level has "basic weekly rate limits". Google's FAQ opens it to anyone aged 18 or older with a personal Google Account in a supported country.

Google lists "Google Antigravity with higher limits and prioritized traffic" among AI Pro's benefits. Claude Sonnet is among the models it names inside Antigravity on that plan, so you get a Claude model Cursor's free plan doesn't offer.

One caveat sits in the offer's terms: students "may experience different usage limits than Google One members on a paid plan." So your free year may not give the same use as a paid plan. Google One is the subscription that Google's AI plans belong to.

To claim Google AI Pro:

1. Go to one.google.com/ai-student signed in with a personal Google Account, not your school one.
2. Prove you are a student through SheerID when asked.
3. Add a payment method. Nothing is charged for 12 months.
4. To avoid $19.99 a month afterwards, cancel in Google One before the twelve months are up. Google's terms say that after you cancel, the plan may stay active until the twelve months end.

Google AI Plus covers students outside the US. The same claim page gives them this cheaper plan. Its benefits include more Gemini use than the free version and Google Colab, a free online space to write and run Python code. They don't include Antigravity's higher limits. The steps are the same, and afterwards it costs $4.99 a month or the local price.

Google's announcement and its terms list different countries for AI Plus. The announcement leaves out Canada, Bolivia, Albania, Hong Kong, Macau and Tunisia. The terms, checked on 4 November 2026, leave out only Hong Kong, Macau and Tunisia. If you study in Canada, Bolivia or Albania, try the claim page.

OpenAI's Codex credits work on a free account. Codex is OpenAI's coding agent, used through a ChatGPT account. The offer page was live on 4 November 2026. Its FAQ, as archived on 27 September 2026, gives these steps:

1. Sign in to ChatGPT, or create a free account. A personal account works.
2. Open chatgpt.com/codex/students, click "Claim now" and verify through SheerID with your university email.
3. Check your ChatGPT usage page: you should see 2,500 credits, worth $100. These are OpenAI's own unit, not GitHub's: 25 of them make $1. They extend Codex "beyond the limits included in your plan" and expire 12 months after they are granted.

JetBrains suits a course taught in its editors. JetBrains makes code editors such as IntelliJ IDEA and PyCharm, and its educational license makes them free for students. After a 30-day trial of JetBrains AI Pro, the AI inside them drops to the free tier. That trial may ask for a payment method, although it stays free.

If you were looking for Claude, Anthropic has no student plan. Students get Claude through their school only when the university buys Claude for Education. Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent, needs a paid plan: on 3 November 2026 Claude's free plan didn't include it.

Student verification: what GitHub, Google and OpenAI check

Cursor has nothing left to check, since its offer is closed. GitHub runs its own check, on your enrollment, school email, proof and location. Google and OpenAI use SheerID, the company that checked students for Cursor.

Google sets four conditions. You must be 18 or older and use a personal Google Account, because the offer is "not available on your school-issued Workspace for Education account". You can't be part of a Google family group, the shared family plan. You also need a payment method at sign-up.

OpenAI asks where you study and live. You must study at a degree-granting university in the US or Canada and live in one of those two countries. There is one offer per student.

Verify with your own documents and your own school email. Fraud is one of the two reasons Cursor gave for closing its free year. PJ Metz, a program manager at GitHub Education, warned students in October 2025 that fraud can get "your entire GitHub account banned."

Is a free plan enough to learn with?

For learning, it can be, as long as you spend it on short questions. The habit that costs least is to ask the AI each time you hit a problem, and to treat it as your teacher. A short question uses little of any allowance, and you stay the one who decides what to work on. I keep a standing instruction, a rule my AI reads before every answer, telling it to answer concisely and to teach as it goes.

Direction matters, according to Chris Piech, a Stanford professor who runs Code in Place, a free online coding course with about 17,000 students. He said in July 2026 that AI handed over without guidance drives learners away: "If we give people AI and just like, 'Here's a chatbot, use it to learn,' predictably people will drop out."

Guidance changed that in the same course. Students who accepted a 10-minute talk with a teacher were 10 percentage points more likely to finish, he said. The talk gave them a direction. That suggests a learner who brings a real problem to the AI also starts with one.

GitHub Education's advice points the same way. Ask Copilot to explain code you don't understand, to say what could go wrong in code you wrote and to write notes explaining that code, rather than to write the assignment. "Confusion is the sweat of learning," says PJ Metz, a former high-school teacher.

At GitHub's prices, 200 credits cover about 80 to about 1,670 short questions a month, depending on the model Auto picks. A single long agent task can take more than a third of the allowance. Studies on how beginners learn with AI are summed up in Replit alternatives.

A small project of your own can fit, if it takes only two or three agent tasks a month on Copilot Student's allowance. Building a product to sell takes more of them, the kind of work a free allowance covers least. How to start a SaaS business sets out what that path costs.