Is Netlify suitable for use in educational contexts anymore?

Hi,

I teach an undergraduate software engineering course with ~200 students each semester at Northeastern University. In the class, the students complete a term project where they design and build a new features on an interactive video chat web app, and run their own deployment. You can see examples of these projects, along with Netlify deployment links here in our Spring 2022 project showcase.

Up until now, we’ve provided a tutorial for students to set up a Netlify deployment of their course project, so that they can share their app with their friends, and have the experience of setting up a real continuous deployment pipeline. Given the new pricing structure, I am planning to rewrite my course content to use another service - it will not be possible to require that students create public repos for their project.

All of the students create their repos within our own GitHub Org. If it would be possible to provide some comp’ed plan for that org, I would be able to continue to train students to use Netlify. I have tried several times to submit this request in a non-public channel (e.g. through the “support” page on the Netlify website, and by emailing support@netlify.com), and was told to post this publicly. Perhaps there are other educators who are also impacted by this change who would like to share the platforms that they are migrating to.

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You could apply for the Netlify open source plan:

I have a similar situation, where I use a free GitHub account attached to a non-profit educational institution to host a research group website. Doing so exposes trains my students to use Netlify.

Like @jon-bell, I wonder whether there are plans to continue offering Starter plans for GitHub accounts that are either free non-profit accounts or attached to .edu email addresses.

I’ve also sought clarification from Netlify, but at the moment I’m exploring other options and would be open to suggestions. It seems like Render might suit me.

3 concurrent builds is pretty lame for this kind of configuration - under the starter plan option, each student group could have 1 concurrent build. This would mean 3 concurrent builds across all student groups, and at that rate I think that we might as well build on GitHub Actions and deploy elsewhere :confused:

Heya @ivank and @jon-bell - we’ll be happy to work with you on this. I’m going to open separate helpdesk threads for both of you where we can discuss how to proceed. This conversation is going to be driven more by our sponsorships team than Support/Forums team, so we think it best to move the conversations into to address each of your individual use cases.

This also goes for anyone else who considers themselves an educational institution. For future explorers, please do not read this as “blanket approval for all educational use cases”, but we are happy to work with anyone in the space 1:1 to see what we can do.

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FWIW I have not received any additional follow-up since @fool’s note 2 weeks ago, other than an automated message this morning asking me to post here again if my issue was not resolved.

Hey there, @jon-bell :wave:

Thanks for your patience and for your follow-up. I have spoken with @fool, and he just responded to your email. Sorry for the delays here, and we look forward to working with you further!

Thanks! It sounds like we will definitely be able to make this work out for this coming Fall semester.

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Hi, I am also using netlify in a course, can I get an upgrade to use a private github repo for my students?

Hi @kuzeko :wave:t6: ,

Welcome to the forums and thanks so much for reaching out and asking. I have opened a help desk ticket so our team can discuss your use case in depth. Please stay tuned to your email. (;

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