I really appreciate Github doing this, so kudos to them.
While I'm no longer a student myself, I don't think cost is the main prohibitive factor for students. The fundamental tools I use for my side projects - Atom, Bitbucket and Heroku - are available for free. The other services are nice to have, but seem to be much more niche.
I think the prohibitive factor is the perception that coding is hard and complex for regular folks, and is only easy for the few born with innate ability.
Cost can be prohibitive for scaling an app from a proof of concept to a working prototype. Especially for something that can't or won't be commercialized later.
For instance, I'm working on a web app to visualize a particular subset of twitter activity. Scaling the database to cope with performance demands may prove challenging on free project tiers.
While I'm no longer a student myself, I don't think cost is the main prohibitive factor for students. The fundamental tools I use for my side projects - Atom, Bitbucket and Heroku - are available for free. The other services are nice to have, but seem to be much more niche.
I think the prohibitive factor is the perception that coding is hard and complex for regular folks, and is only easy for the few born with innate ability.