NStrim is going open source for education
You provide the infrastructure. We provide the solution.
Every teacher who has ever lost the first lesson of term to broken setups deserves a way out — whether or not there is budget for it. From Q1 2027 you will be able to run NStrim on your own hardware, under your own domain, for your own students.
What "open source for education" means
The teaching platform becomes yours to run. We keep building it, hosting it for those who want it hosted, and supporting the schools that need a hand.
Yours to run
- The platform source, under an OSI-approved licence.
- Self-hosted student environments on your own servers.
- Your domain, your branding, your data residency.
- Classes, assignments, submissions and threaded marking.
- Competition mode and live invigilation, national events included.
- Community support and public issue tracker.
Stays with us
- Managed hosting, scaling and uptime guarantees.
- AI module drafting and the model credits behind it.
- Managed hosting for competitions you would rather not run yourself.
- SSO, SLAs, onboarding and priority support.
- Commercial and non-educational deployments.
Who it is for
The educational edition is for institutions that teach, not for products that resell.
Schools & universities
Accredited institutions running programming courses, labs or exams for enrolled students.
Vocational training
Bootcamps and training centres in the public sector or funded by it, teaching to a curriculum.
Non-profit initiatives
Coding clubs, olympiad organisers and outreach programmes that do not charge for access.
How we get there
Dates are intentions, not promises. We would rather ship late than ship something schools cannot rely on.
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Q2 2026
Licence and governance
We pick the licence, publish the contribution guidelines and decide how educational eligibility is verified.
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Q4 2026
Private preview
A handful of partner institutions self-host a release candidate and tell us everything that breaks.
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Q1 2027
Public release
The repository opens, with deployment docs, reference infrastructure and a migration path from managed hosting.
What to expect
The small print, up front, so nobody plans a term around a misunderstanding.
Educational use only
The licence covers teaching and assessment at eligible institutions. Commercial use, resale or hosting NStrim as a service for third parties is not included.
You run the infrastructure
Student environments are containers, and containers need somewhere to live. You supply the hosts, storage, backups and the person who gets paged at 2am.
AI features are not included
Module drafting depends on paid model providers. Self-hosted deployments can plug in their own API keys, but we do not ship credits with the open source edition.
Community support
Public issues and discussions, answered on a best-effort basis. Response times, SLAs and hands-on onboarding remain part of the managed plans.
Feature parity is not absolute
Enterprise SSO, managed scaling and priority onboarding stay in the hosted product. Competition mode and live invigilation are not among them — those ship in the open source edition.
National competitions
Competition mode and live invigilation ship in the open source edition, so a national olympiad can run entirely on its own infrastructure. And we would gladly help: if you are organising a national competition, talk to us and we will support you in running it.
Tell us about your competitionFinal terms will be published with the licence in 2026. If your institution has a hard requirement, tell us now — it is easier to accommodate before the licence is signed than after.
Be there on day one
One email when the repository opens, and a heads-up before the private preview. Nothing else.