A free year of Kiro, now for students around the world

When we launched the Kiro Students tier in March, we started with 11 universities. Demand outran that list almost immediately. Students at schools we had not reached yet kept asking us the same thing: when is my school next?

With a new school year starting, we want more students heading back to campus to have serious tools in their hands. So we are expanding the Kiro Students program to 121 new universities across 16 countries. Eligible students in those 16 countries now get the same offer: one full year of free access to Kiro with 1,000 credits per month, with full access to paid features such as premium models and Kiro Web. No credit card. No trial timer. Just build.

Getting started takes just a few steps:

1. Sign up or log in. Use your university-affiliated email to create a Kiro account with any of our sign in options. If you already have a Kiro account, make sure your university-affiliated email is associated with it before proceeding.
2. Verify your student status. After signing in, if you are a student at an eligible university, you will see a “You are eligible for Kiro Students” banner in your account page. Click the verify button and complete a quick verification through SheerID. It only takes a minute.
3. Start building. Once verified, you will obtain access to 1,000 credits per month for one full year.

That is it. No lengthy application. No waiting period.

A few things to keep in mind:

• One-time verification. You can only verify your student status once, so make sure your information is correct.
• No overages. If you hit your 1,000 credit limit for the month, you will need to wait until the next cycle. Credits do not roll over.
• After one year ends. Once your one-year access expires, your account will be automatically downgraded to the Kiro free plan.

You get Kiro across four surfaces: the IDE, the CLI, Kiro Web, and Kiro Crew. Here is how to actually use each one during a semester.

In the IDE — plan with specs, build hands-on. For students who like to stay close to the editor. Describe what you want and Kiro turns it into requirements, a design, and a sequenced task list, so an intimidating project becomes a checklist you work one task at a time. Build things that make your week easier — a scheduler that finds open slots across everyone’s calendars, a flashcard app from your lecture notes — or the startup idea you keep talking about. Running several at once? Switch to Agent Focus: spawn parallel tasks, run them as cloud sessions so they don’t tie up your laptop, and review each one from a single place.

In the CLI — for students who live in the terminal. The same agentic power in your shell, built for scripting and automation. Point it at the chores that eat your week: sort your lecture recordings, back up your project to GitHub nightly, turn your syllabus into calendar events, or run your tests before every commit. It works over SSH on your school’s lab machines and remote clusters, and you can hand long jobs to a cloud session that keeps running after you close your laptop.

With Kiro Web — build from any browser, no install. Not every student can install software on the machine in front of them. Kiro Web runs in the browser — a locked-down lab computer, a borrowed laptop, a Chromebook. It’s the fastest way from idea to something running: a landing page for your club, a hackathon game, a same-day prototype to show a cofounder. Kick off work between classes, let it run, pick it up on your own machine later.

With Kiro Crew — open source, and yours to shape. Read how it works and bend it to your workflow: wire in your own tools, define your own agents, then let them run in the background. One sends a “loose threads” reminder of unanswered email each morning; one pulls your project’s latest changes before your first class. During a hackathon, set a crew loose on several features while you focus on the demo. You come back to work already in motion.

Whichever surface you use, the pattern is the same: you describe what you want, Kiro breaks it down, and you stay in control. That’s the skill that carries past graduation — not just shipping code, but decomposing a hard problem, picking the right tool, and directing the work.

We believe in students as the people already building what comes next. 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. AI agents are becoming part of the standard engineering toolkit, and we want every student to have real access to them, no matter where they study.

Going global is the point. Talent does not cluster in one country, and neither should opportunity. That is why we expanded from 11 schools to 121 new universities across 16 countries, and why we are not stopping here.

We are bringing Kiro directly to campus, and now on more continents. Join the Kiro Student Discord Community to stay in the loop on campus visits, workshops, and hackathons we will be hosting at select schools around the world. We will share dates and details there first.

Want to co-host a hackathon with Kiro at your school? Let us know in the Discord. We would love to partner with you, wherever you are.

Head to kiro.dev/students to learn more and sign up. Share what you are building with #KiroStudents — we are @kirodotdev on X, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and @kiro.dev on Bluesky.

We cannot wait to see what you build.