AWS gives students a free year of Kiro
Students at 132 universities in 18 countries get a free year of Kiro, the same agent professional engineering teams use. That is 1,000 credits a month, verified by university email, with no credit card required. The March pilot covered 11 universities.
AWS has opened its coding agent Kiro to students for a free year, across 132 universities in 18 countries. In the company's framing, what is on offer is not a cut-down student edition but the same agent professional teams use every day.
The terms
Each student gets 1,000 credits a month, access to the latest models, and the zero-install Kiro Web. Verification is a university email plus a one-minute SheerID check. No credit card, no trial timer.
That detail matters. Most free student tiers ask for a card and roll onto a paid plan when the clock runs out. This one does not set that trap.
Twelve times the pilot
The programme began as a pilot in March 2026 with 11 universities in two countries. The current version is twelve times larger and moves beyond North America into Asia Pacific, Europe and Latin America. AWS says thousands of students in the pilot built applications ranging from accessibility to healthcare.
What this actually is
A free student tier is not philanthropy, it is an investment in habit. A developer carries the tool they learned at school into their first job, a path that editors and cloud providers have understood for decades. Competition among coding agents is shifting from model quality toward whose tool sits open all day, and handing students a year is a move in exactly that race.
The announcement does not spell out which countries the 132 schools sit in; the full list is on the programme page.
Sources: AWS announcement, kiro.dev/students.
