[UK Students / Ex Students] Half price Amazon Prime, discounted Office and Windows

Either an active student, or still have access to your University email address since finishing (you’ll be surprised how many University’s give you access to your email address for life as part of their Alumi service)? Well you may not have known, but you get some great perks for being a student including half price Amazon Prime, heavily discounted Office 365 (University edition) and access to loads of free Microsoft software under the dreamspark program.

You can also get half price Spotify, discount at Apple as well as various retail stores (both active and ex-students) which I have already documented here: [UK] Ex-students – Still get student discount at various retail shops, Apple Store and half price Spotify Premium


Half Price Amazon Prime

Amazon has a little known discount program for Amazon Prime for students (or anyone with an .ac.uk email address). It's part of the Amazon Student Program. You can sign up here:

Amazon: Student

Once signed up, you get a 6 month free trial of Amazon prime (usual customers only get 30 days) and at the end of the trial you can either cancel or let it auto-renew at the cost of £39 a year. That’s 50% off the Market rate and comes with all the perks that a full paying member will get. That includes sharing with family or friends (even if they don’t live with you) and they don’t have to be students either!



You also get access to the Amazon Prime streaming service (formally Netflix). Though I should not you cannot access this service during the free 6 month trial. You can however opt-in to paying the £39 a year upfront to get instant access.

A fantastic deal, and if you split the cost over a few friends or family then its dirt cheap for unlimited next day delivery!


Office 365 - (Massive discount - usual cost is £65 a year, you get it for £52 in total for four years!)

Microsoft have always been very generous with their student deals, and Office 365 is one of the best. For a usual home user, office either costs upwards of £199 for a dedicated license, or they can choose the yearly subscription service Office 365 Home Premium which costs around £65 a year. The benefit of a subscription service is that you always have the latest version, and can install it on multiple computers, as well as on your mobile phone (iOS, Android or Windows Phone) as well as on iPad’s.



However as a student, Microsoft offer Office 365 University at around £52 which includes a 4 year subscription (no yearly) renewal. The cheapest place to pick it up is at Amazon:

Microsoft Office 365 University, Licence Card, 1 User, 2 Computers, 4 Years (PC/Mac): Amazon.co.uk: Software

Once purchased, you just redeem the code online with your Microsoft Account and you get access to download Office on up to 2 Computers and 2 Mobile Devices. This includes all the major office applications including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher, as well as an additional 20GB of OneDrive storage and 60 minutes of Skype minutes every month.


Microsoft Dreamspark Program (Free Windows License)

This is more widely known, but if you didn’t know then you should! Microsoft’s dreamspark program allows anyone with a student email address access to loads of free Microsoft software at no cost. Sadly it doesn’t include Office, which you need the Office 365 University edition discussed earlier) but does include Windows Server licenses, Visual Studio’s and lots of free training and certification. You can easily use Windows Server with a few tweaks as a home operating system which I know many people have done. (Windows Server 2012 is just Windows 8 with Server components added which you can disable).

You can sign up and verify at:

Microsoft Dreamspark

Once in, enjoy access to loads of great software for free!