Today we announce that Sourcetable’s AI spreadsheet is free for students and faculty. Details below.
Why free?
Because it’s good for the world, and it will be interesting to see how students push the frontiers of AI.
For some context, we soft-launched out of stealth on Hacker News a few weeks ago. The most surprising thing is just how diverse the users have been beyond the core business archetypes for whom we built the software.
We’ve seen plenty of business and finance students (of course), but also bacteriophage researchers, physicists, soil scientists, a criminologist, engineers, and all manner of social science students playing with Sourcetable in unexpected ways. None of these people were on our bingo card!
We think this is great, and we want to encourage more of it without the pressure for monetization. Accordingly, we’re making Sourcetable’s software freely available for students and faculty starting today.
Quick recap: what is Sourcetable?
Sourcetable is an AI spreadsheet and data platform. People use Sourcetable’s AI assistant for things like data cleaning and analysis, sample data generation, formula assist, and advanced chart generation.
It's much more advanced than Excel Co-Pilot, and can even be used to "talk to" spreadsheets, databases and applications using natural language.
Why free for students?
Many years ago, I sat on a university advisory board where I counseled that tertiary institutions were becoming increasingly irrelevant¹. Lectures were online and recorded, MOOCs and Youtube were abundant and available, and the speed of change was out-evolving what a legacy faculty could provide. In short, the Internet was eating their lunch.
Last week, I sat watching an MBA student feed questions into Sourcetable’s AI as it provided answers, did their course work for them, and suggested insights and follow-up questions they hadn’t even thought to ask. If you’ve ever watched someone do a week’s worth of homework in ten minutes, then you will know the expletives that followed were those of wonder and joy.
Networking was the original digital disruptor. It made education available everywhere, for free. A true gift to human potential.
Intelligence is the second chapter. AI will transform every facet of our species, from our workforce to our social lives to the very framing of our world. In an educational context, every human² now has access to a high quality interactive personal tutor on every topic imaginable. In a practical sense, we can go from zero to one – and far beyond – on any topic, quickly, while indulging every newb or advanced curiosity that comes to mind. This is incredibly exciting!³
AI’s hype status is near mythological, but its impact on our collective humanity is not to be underestimated. Our children will grow up immersed in a raw recursive feed of imagination and training. They will be like us, but also something entirely new⁴.
For perspective, my parent’s generation shifted from paper to digital. My generation watched Nokias become internet-connected iPhones, then single-file PCs migrate from tethered workstations to fully collaborative web-first software in a hybrid office / work-from-home culture. Gen Z was the first “Internet native” generation, immersed in our culture from day 1, but even they now face a new world as AI scrambles everything again. Like it or not, the AI generation isn’t here yet, and it isn’t Gen Z: it’s coming.
So how do we accelerate a glimpse of that future today? The best answer we have is to bend the arc of progress as much towards youth as possible, and to remove all economic friction from their ability to experiment and play.
Hence, free.
Program Details
Our free tier for students includes Sourcetable's AI spreadsheet, AI assistant, AI analyst, and AI-enhanced Business Intelligence tool. (i.e. the "Pro" plan)
The only thing we’re not making free is database sync add-on after the initial 14-day free trial; this is unlikely to affect most students.
To redeem, just go to sourcetable.com and sign up with your .edu student email.
OMG this is amazing! How can we ever repay you?
If your use is non-traditional or not business related, we would love to hear from you. New and unexpected use cases are really fun for our team to learn about.
Ok that's it.
Tell your friends!
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¹ Universities are still essential for advanced research and play an important role in the progress of science and civilization; I do not mean to suggest otherwise.
² Every human with access to a decent internet connection and moderate economic means. We still have a long way to go.
³ It's also a huge boon for productivity. $3tr+ in U.S. GDP is directly reliant on spreadsheets as the primary work tool.
⁴ They may look at us as we do the ancient Greeks: with similarities in cultural understanding, but also quite foreign. As the pace of innovation accelerates, the cultural distance between each generation will widen.
