Amazon Web Services is expanding its free student coding program twelvefold. On Tuesday, the company opened Kiro for Students to 121 more universities across 18 countries. It’s a jump from the 11 campuses it started with in the U.S. and Canada. Students at all 132 schools need only a university email and a one-minute SheerID check to claim a year of access and a 1,000-credit monthly allowance.
“We believe in students. Not as future customers, but as the people already building what comes next,” Sharanya Balaji, an AWS product manager, wrote in a blog post. “The best time to get comfortable with professional-grade tools is while you still have the freedom to explore, break things, and learn without pressure.”
That sounds good, but it hides why AWS is doing this: It’s a cheap customer acquisition effort in developer tools, and the software vendor that owns the student’s first agentic workflow has a decent shot at creating brand loyalty. In addition, AWS is scaling up its student outreach at a time when others have been trimming back—Cursor discontinued its student discount plan in June, citing fraud, and GitHub suspended signups for its Copilot Student program in April after agentic workloads outran what its pricing could support, only reopening them in mid-June.
Introduced in 2025, Kiro is an integrated development environment, similar to Microsoft Visual Studio, Google’s Android Studio, and IntelliJ IDEA. It uses agents to expedite software development, taking high-level specifications to generate entire features, tests, documentation, and workflows. Students, like all users, have access to Kiro’s IDE, Command-Line Interface, web and mobile apps, and open-source development workspace, Kiro Crew.
Kiro for Students launched in March and is a plan similar to AWS’s Kiro Pro, except it’s free and prohibits credit overages. It was initially available to students at Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago, the University of Waterloo, and six other universities. There were always plans to add more academic institutions, but which ones to add depended on demand. Suffice it to say, once word got out about the program, the requests quickly rolled in.
“That signal alone told us the program needed to scale faster and broader than we originally scoped,” Darko Mesaros, a distinguished developer advocate at AWS, told The AI Economy in an email. “We also learned that lowering the barrier to entry matters a lot,” he added, saying that without the need for a credit card, a trial timer, or having to fill out a lengthy application, students “just start building.” And while specific numbers weren’t provided, Mesaros said that between Q1 and Q2 of this year, Kiro usage more than tripled while the number of developers doubled.
AWS saw that it wasn’t just computer science majors who leaped at its Kiro offer. Designers, interns, first-time coders, hackathon veterans, and others “all shipped real work.” That was an important metric for AWS because “when that many different kinds of builders are producing real output, the program is working,” Mesaros said.
While students have their pick of vibe coding tools—GitHub Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, Vercel’s v0, Cognition’s Devin, and SpaceXAI’s Cursor—Mesaros said that Kiro provides students with something more.
Vibe coding “lowers the barrier to building and gives students a way to get prototyping reps in quickly.” Yet as they become more familiar with the technology, they’ll encounter limitations such as slop, reduced context, excessive token use, and complex build challenges. But with Kiro, Mesaros said, students take a spec-driven deployment approach, defining goals upfront and having Kiro break a project into requirements, design, and an organized task list—all before code is written.
Some notable tools and apps created within the program’s first six months include a voice-activated remote wellness system that connects at-risk patients with medical professionals. Another student developed an electronics prototyping tool that turns natural-language descriptions into wired breadboard circuits, with animated current flow to catch safety issues before they are physically assembled. And an Arizona State computer science graduate student also developed a fully functional RAG-based chatbot.
Universities are also building programming around Kiro. Jay Nappy, an AWS manager for AI and research programs, told The AI Economy that ASU’s Enterprise Technology organization, for example, organized a hackathon to build applications that tackle real-world problems in education, accessibility, and economics. Teams competed for over $10,000 in scholarships, but the top team received a richer prize: A first-round interview with AWS’s agentic AI team. That hackathon winner developed an app turning visual web content into audio feedback for visually impaired users.
“It is inspiring to see universities take the tool and create their own high-impact experiences around it,” Nappy said.
The 121 new universities span 18 countries, including the U.S., Canada, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. Mesaros explained that AWS prioritized geographic reach across a range of institution types. So it’s not just research universities but also polytechnics and applied sciences schools. And in some cases, it’s not individual institutions but entire systems. Singapore, for example, accounts for 14 of the new additions, which covers all six of its autonomous universities, its five polytechnics, its Institute of Technical Education, the National Institute of Education, and the Singapore Institute of Management. In a single move, nearly the entire Southeast Asian nation’s tertiary system now has access to Kiro.
Interestingly, India and China, home to two of the largest developer populations, are notably absent.
In the U.S., some of the newest additions include Florida State University; Boston University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Pennsylvania State University; Purdue University; Rutgers University; San Francisco State University; San Jose State University; The George Washington University; The Ohio State University; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Colorado at Boulder; University of Maryland, College Park; and the University of Utah.
“The goal is to make sure students at different kinds of schools, in different parts of the world, all had the same access,” Mesaros said. “The schools and countries we are announcing now are what Kiro and the partnering schools were logistically able to bring to life at the top of the school year.”
And AWS isn’t done either—it plans to bring Kiro for Students to more campuses worldwide. It has established a Discord community to share information about its campus visits, workshops, and hackathons it’ll host at select schools in the future.
Students can sign up for Kiro today. But be warned: After a year, plans revert to Kiro’s free tier, with users limited to a 50-credit monthly allowance.
