What happens to a github student account's repositories at the end of 2 years?

Question

I just got upgraded to a free github micro plan using my university email address. I\'m planning to use the private repositories for some class projects this semester, but I\'m

Answer 1

The timeline of your expiring Educational account is something like this:

• you will get an email/notification in Github announcing you that your education coupon will expire, and ask you to either:

  • make all your private repos public and downgrade to a free account,
  • add a payment method and they will start charging you after the coupon expires, or
  • renew your educational coupon.

• the time comes, and, if you didn't do any of these, they will lock you out of your private repos.

What does this lock means?

• you cannot access your repo in any way, ie. you cannot even see your files in github, or clone it.

What can you do to access them?

• go to each one of your private repos, in settings, and make them public. This will give you access to them, so you can clone or download a copy quickly and then delete them.
• pay for a premium account.
• renew your educational coupon (or any coupon for free premium account).

I had this problem today when I wanted to access one of my private repos.

My free educational plan expired in August. I got a big red notification bar in Github telling me to pay for a Micro plan or to downgrade. I didn't need my private repos, so I ignored it, until today.

Personally, I find this policy weird, as no other service does this. How will it be if you stopped paying for extra storage on Google Drive, and the next day you find that half your files were hidden until you pay up.

Answer 2

Updated 2020 answer

I had my student account that expired recently and was asked to either provide billing details to continue on pro subscription which now costs USD $4/mo (vs $7/mo previously) or downgrade to a free account.

Downgrading to the free account would still let me keep and access all my private repos (with less number of collaborators allowed I think) while losing access to GitHub Pages and GitHub Wikis within those private repos - so not too bad overall. This is the message that I received while downgrading my account

Recent changes to their pricing, features and billing structure by Microsoft resulted in the following features included as part of the free subscription:

GitHub Free for user accounts

With GitHub Free for user accounts, you can work with unlimited collaborators on unlimited public repositories with a full feature set, and on unlimited private repositories with a limited feature set.

With GitHub Free, your user account includes:

• GitHub Community Support
• GitHub Dependabot alerts
• Two-factor authentication enforcement
• 2,000 GitHub Actions minutes
• 500MB GitHub Packages storage

And the pro account includes the following features:

GitHub Pro

In addition to the features available with GitHub Free for user accounts, GitHub Pro includes:

• GitHub Support via email
• 3,000 GitHub Actions minutes
• 2GB GitHub Packages storage
• Advanced tools and insights in private repositories:
  • Required pull request reviewers
  • Multiple pull request reviewers
  • Auto-linked references
  • GitHub Pages
  • Wikis
  • Protected branches
  • Code owners
  • Repository insights graphs: Pulse, contributors, traffic, commits, code frequency, network, and forks

Source: https://docs.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-github/githubs-products#github-pro

Answer 3

(Disclosure: I work at GitHub)

So long as you're still a student, you're eligible for the academic discount. Once your coupon expires, you can re-apply for the student discount.

When you re-apply, be sure you've added your school-issued email address to your account, that will expedite the approval process.

You will receive a notification email before your discount expires. When the discount does expire, your account will be locked which means that you won't be able to access your private repositories. Your private repositories will not be deleted and they will not be made public.

Of course, if you ever have any troubles, you can always email support@github.com.

Answer 4

After the two years, you will have to start paying for private repositories ($7/month) otherwise your repositories will be removed after a retention period.

They will give you 30 days to pay or they will remove the repositories.