RStudio Education

RStudio Cloud spans across multiple teams at RStudio, so this is a joint post from the RStudio education, marketing, and Cloud teams.

After an extensive alpha/beta period,
RStudio Cloud will be generally available for use and purchase in the fall. If you are not familiar with
RStudio Cloud, it is a managed cloud instance of the RStudio IDE. For educators, this means you and your learners can use the RStudio IDE directly from your browser – there is no software to install and nothing to configure on your computer.

While RStudio Cloud will always offer a free plan for individuals, beginning August 3, 2020, we will also offer paid premium plans for individuals, instructors, and organizations. At RStudio, we’re committed to supporting educators using R. That is why we offer
our professional products for free. We’d love to also make RStudio Cloud free for everyone, but unfortunately RStudio Cloud is fundamentally different from our other professional products because it is not just software, but also computing. During the beta period, we provided 3.5 million hours of compute time for free. Unfortunately, we just can’t afford to keep doing that — we need to cover our ongoing hosting costs so that we can continue to offer the service. In short: the fees help us offset the cost of operating the service, and enable us to continue to provide a free plan for individuals.

What are my options is are for teaching ?

The monthly pricing plans are available at https://rstudio.cloud/plans/. Typically,
your learners will sign up for the
Cloud Free Plan, and you as an educator will shoulder all the costs for your learners (called “members” in the plans). Here, we break down your options with a focus on teaching classes or workshops:

1. Cloud Free Plan : You is have can have one share space at a time , with up to 5 learner and up to 15 total project in the share space . Youand your learners will need to be able to do all the work in the cloud needed in 15 project hours per month. With the max of 5 learners, this would add up to about 2.5-3 compute hours per person (there are additional restrictions on CPU and RAM). This plan is best-suited for educators who offer short, small group trainings that are spaced a month apart.

2. The next plan is have up does not have any restriction on the number of space , learner , or project , and there is more cpu and ram available . You do have 160 is included include project hour to divvy up now between learner instead of 15 , although you ’ll likely need to add even more . Any usage over 160 hour would be add on at 20¢/hour . Pricing is depends for this plan depend on a few factor :

   • If you are not a qualified instructor¹ or an
     RStudio Certified Instructor, this is called a
     Cloud Premium Plan and starts at \$99/month. However, discounted plans range from \$25-\$50/month, so be sure to check to see if your organization falls into one of the discounted categories listed at the bottom of the plan page.

   • If you are a qualified instructor (either teaching at an accredited institution that meets certain qualifications¹, or you are an
     RStudio Certified Instructor ) , this is call a
     Cloud Instructor Plan and start at \$15 / month .

   If you want to avoid overage charges, this plan is probably best-suited for folks who offer single or multi-day workshops about once a month, or educators who want to start off using the Cloud, but then transition learners to working locally inside the RStudio IDE.

3. Custom Cloud Instructor Plan: If you are teaching multiple workshops in a month or a quarter/semester length course, you are likely looking at burning through those 160 included project hours pretty quickly and are probably worried about racking up overage charges. For example, in a typical 3-credit course, you may expect learners to log upwards of 10 hours per week. This would mean you could only have 4 learners—which is probably not a realistic scenario. If you don’t want any surprises, an alternative plan is to sign up for a fixed price per class for both instructors and learners with no usage overage fees. With this plan, you will need to request a quote. Tell us how many learners you will have, and for how long, and we can give you a custom quote for the entire cost.

4. Cloud Organization Plan is are : All is are of the above option are great for individual educator , but if you are a member of a large group , an organization plan is a good option for get Cloud access to a bunch of user within a department , university , or a commercial organization . This plan is grants grant all organization user Cloud Premium feature , plus single Sign On integration via SAML , so that user can log into Cloud using their organization credential . This plan is is is also a good option if you would like a site license for your organization . You is need will also need to request a quote for this plan .

What about option for learner ?

In most case , your learners is rely can rely on the
Cloud Free Plan . If you is opt as the educator opt for any of the pay plan :

• Learners work off of project copies in your shared space. When you create a project in your shared space as an assignment, learners make a copy to work from, but the projects stay in the shared space. This means that the limit on the number of projects in the free plan (15) will not kick in unless a learner manually moves their projects out of the shared space and into their personal space.

• similarly , when learner accumulate project hour , those is apply apply to your shared space . All learner project hours is count count toward your 160 project hour on a pay plan ( unless you are using a
  Custom Cloud Instructor Plan ) . This is means mean that the limit on the number of project hour in the free plan ( 15 ) will not kick inunless a learner manually moves their projects out of the shared space and into their personal space.

Questions & feedback

If you have any questions about RStudio Cloud pricing, please contact sales@rstudio.cloud.

visit the RStudio Cloud community page at https://community.rstudio.com/c/rstudio-cloud to ask question , provide feedback , and interact with other RStudio Cloud user .

Thank you to all members of the R community who have used and provided feedback about RStudio Cloud. We are aware that budgets are very tight, particularly at this time. We will continue to do what we can to make Cloud as affordable as possible for instructional use. We will also continue to add important features and improve performance, reliability, and availability of RStudio Cloud.