Free access to Proxylity UDP Gateway for students, educators, and qualifying non-profit organizations. Teach and learn UDP network programming — with real production-ready infrastructure, not a sandbox.
The Academic & Non-Profit Program is open to three groups. Each has its own tier so the program fits the way you actually work.
Enrolled in an accredited college, university, or technical program. Provides renewable access to UDP Gateway for coursework, capstone projects, research, or personal learning.
Teaching courses or conducting academic research that involves network protocols, distributed systems, IoT, or cloud architecture. Includes renewable packet allowance to support entire class cohorts.
Registered 501(c)(3) organizations (or equivalent outside the US) whose mission benefits a constructive public cause. Approved non-profits receive renewable credits for qualifying workloads.
Program participants get the same UDP Gateway that commercial customers run in production — not a stripped-down learning environment.
| Benefit | Student | Instructor | Non-Profit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly packet allowance* | ✓ | ✓ (per project/course) | ✓ (per workload) |
| Active Listeners | ✓ | ✓ (per project/student) | ✓ (per workload) |
| All 14+ AWS integrations | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| WireGuard encryption | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| CloudFormation & IaC support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-region deployment | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| CloudWatch metrics & logs | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Email support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Curriculum consultation | — | ✓ | — |
| Program duration | 12 months (renewable) | Per semester or year | Annual, ongoing |
* Packet allowances reset each calendar month. Usage beyond the included allowance is paused rather than billed — you won't receive a surprise charge. Note that your own AWS account will still incur standard AWS service charges for Lambda invocations, SQS requests, and other destination services you use.
UDP Gateway is a production tool, so the projects you build with it are real — deployable, demonstrable, and portfolio-worthy.
Teach or study how UDP works in detail and at scale. Build custom protocols, actual SYSLOG collectors, DNS stubs, NTP servers, and RADIUS backends — not toy simulations.
Experiment with serverless event-driven pipelines. Benchmark latency, test multi-region failover, or analyze packet batching under different load profiles.
Deploy and measure a real distributed system for academic research. Produce results that reflect production behavior, not sandbox limitations.
Ingest telemetry from physical or simulated devices into Lambda, Kinesis, or DynamoDB. A natural fit for embedded systems and mechatronics programs.
Build low-latency multiplayer backends using the same architecture professional studios use. Scale to zero between sessions — no idle server costs.
Stream field data from remote sensors or field devices into AWS for analysis and reporting, without the overhead of managing infrastructure.
UDP Gateway works well in courses covering networking basics, protocol design, distributed systems, cloud computing, IoT, and real-time systems. Because it's deployed via CloudFormation into students' own AWS accounts, it fits naturally alongside AWS Educate, AWS Academy, and similar academic cloud programs.
Suggested course integrations include: an IoT project where sensors stream telemetry through Kinesis into DynamoDB and Bedrock for analysis; a networking lab where students build and instrument a real syslog pipeline; or, a cloud architecture assignment comparing serverless UDP to a traditional server-based approach.
We're happy to consult on curriculum design, provide guest lecture materials, or review your templates for students before the semester starts. Mention this in your application and we'll follow up.
Yes. AWS offers a free tier and AWS Educate accounts for students with no credit card required. Proxylity's credits and fee waivers eliminate Proxylity's charges; standard AWS charges for destination services (Lambda, SQS, Kinesis, etc.) remain, but free-tier AWS accounts typically cover normal academic workloads.
The same definition used for commercial accounts: any UDP datagram delivered to a destination (inbound), or any reply packet sent back to a remote client (outbound). Packets up to 1KB count as one packet; larger packets count as multiples rounded up. Blocked packets — traffic rejected by your firewall or allowlist rules — are not counted.
UDP Gateway will stop routing new packets until the month resets. You won't receive a bill from Proxylity. Your AWS charges for destination services (Lambda invocations, etc.) continue to be governed by AWS. If you consistently need more than your tier allows, contact us and we'll discuss your use case.
No. The Non-Profit tier covers workloads that directly support your charitable mission. If your organization generates revenue through a specific product or service, that workload isn't eligible — only the mission-aligned portion is. We review use cases as part of the application and will flag anything that doesn't fit. When in doubt, describe your use case in the application and we'll be straightforward with you.
Yes, with some caveats. An instructor or program coordinator can apply for an institutional enrollment, listing participating students. Each student still needs their own AWS account, and Proxylity needs a list of those accounts to set up credits and fee waivers. Instructors and/or students will need to share the AWS account IDs after enrollment is confirmed. Reach out through the contact page and describe your situation.
You will be notified before your term ends. At the end of your term you can choose to have your subscription transition to standard pay-as-you-go pricing or allow access to expire in which case your listeners will be automatically deactivated and hard limits on packets and listeners set to zero. You can choose to manually delete your listeners to stop charges at any time. We'll remind you before the transition happens.
Yes. Accredited institutions and qualifying non-profits outside the US are welcome to apply. For non-profits, we accept the equivalent of 501(c)(3) status in your country — provide your registration number and a brief explanation of your organization's legal status in the application.
Open-source projects are evaluated case by case. The project should have a clear educational or public-interest purpose rather than being primarily a commercial product with an open-source license. Describe the project and its goals in your application.
Use the contact form and select Academic / Non-Profit Program from the inquiry type menu. Tell us who you are, what you're building, and which tier fits your situation. We'll get back to you within 3–5 business days.
Questions? Email us at academic@proxylity.com
