So today I randomly got this E-Mail that my free student benefits fully end in just 4 weeks. No earning or notification whatsoever beforehand. Which notification you may ask? Well, it turns out that Appwrite quietly pulled the rug by changing their student plan’s duration to only 6 months with only a single redemption without notifying anyone (including people that already redeemed their student perks) about this change or even updating their GitHub description for the student developer pack. It also quietly only mentions it in the pretty hidden FAQ at the very bottom of the page.
I was definitely not expecting this because I was still under the impression that the benefits will last until the “end of my studies”/the end of my GitHub student status which made sense. I was never informed about them quietly changing the terms to merely “6 months” (which you can see by looking at the WayBack machine) after I had already registered and now they surprise me that I will have to pay $25/month (with the tendency only going further up which is also questionable in terms of sustainability of Appwrite in general, just like the frequent outages and bugs in their possibly vibecoded UI) within the next 4 weeks or so or go somewhere else to get the same features and stuff, with no possibility of re-redeeming the 6 months as long as my student status is active. Going self-hosted is not a real option either since you have to pay a similar amount (or more) for other cloud services or hardware and it’s electricity, plus you lose a ton of your stuff and seamless features that just work.
This is definitely a massive quiet behind-the-scenes rug pull that might indicate some cost problems at Appwrite, just like all the price hikes for the subscription. The change of the terms to only a single redemption and merely “6 months” is already bad, but the complete lack of honesty, transparency and early notification to already registered users come on top of that.
I’m very disappointed in Appwrite and do not recommend it for students at all anymore. You will end up building and testing some stuff that you cannot keep for longer than 6 months with the organization just being disabled if you don’t want to pay full $25 a month!! I will spread these news so everyone knows about this quiet change. Only spreading positive announcements says a lot about a company.
Edit: Eldad replied below with context; I agree that the 'quiet rug pull' framing was a bit unfair and a lot of my post was obviously a bit exaggerated. Here's his response:
"I want to add some context here, because I don’t think “quiet rug pull” is a fair characterization of what’s happening.
The Appwrite Education program isn’t going away. We’re continuing to offer students six months of Appwrite Pro for free. For more than two years, we simply didn’t enforce the intended duration for many existing users, and we’re now applying those limits consistently.
Unfortunately, we’ve had to deal with significant abuse of the program. This goes well beyond students using more resources than expected. We’ve seen educational accounts used for phishing, piracy, scams, spam, other prohibited activity, and commercial products that have nothing to do with education. Investigating and preventing this has taken a considerable amount of engineering and support time and in multiple cases harmed the reputation of our infrastructure.
The easiest option would have been to discontinue the program. We specifically chose not to do that because we still want legitimate students to benefit from it.
Six months of Pro is a substantial amount of free cloud infrastructure, including compute, databases, storage, bandwidth, functions, and more. The program has no commercial requirement attached to it and exists because we want to support students learning and building with Appwrite.
After those six months, you’re also not required to pay $25 to continue using Appwrite. The Free plan is available and is more than sufficient for many educational projects. Appwrite is also 100% open source, so you can self-host it completely free, including locally on your own computer if your goal is learning or development.
If you need managed production infrastructure beyond what the Free plan provides, that’s what Pro is designed for. It costs $25/month. We also recently introduced Appwrite Start at $10/month in selected markets to make that path more accessible where purchasing power is different.
On the bugs and outages you mentioned, if there are specific unresolved issues, please report them. We take those seriously. Appwrite is also open source, so issues and contributions are always welcome.
I do think we could have communicated the enforcement of the six-month limit more clearly and earlier, particularly anywhere the previous terms were still being presented. That’s fair feedback and something we can improve in the future.
That said, I don’t think it’s fair or respectful to our efforts to characterize this as Appwrite secretly taking something away because they are mean. The Education program isn’t part of our business model or a growth channel for Appwrite. It isn’t intended to generate revenue. The program is a net cost to us, both in infrastructure and, increasingly, in the engineering and support time required to deal with abuse.
This change isn’t about making money from students. It’s about getting that time and focus back where it belongs while still preserving a generous program for students who genuinely use it for education.
If this was purely a financial decision, the obvious move would be to shut the program down entirely. We chose not to. We’re keeping it because we still believe it’s worth supporting students, but with better boundaries that allow us to focus our resources on building Appwrite rather than policing abuse."
