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

(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 [email protected].

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.

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.