You spend a fair amount of time on your phone, right? Have you thought about what student apps might be useful during your time at uni, so you can streamline your schedule and maybe save a bit of money? Well, here’s the Mezzino selection of what’s actually worth downloading!
Pinching Pennies
UNiDAYS is the unanimous queen of discount apps, and you’ll do well to find a student without it. Verify your student status once and you unlock discounts across a huge variety of different brands – think gym memberships, fashion brands, software subscriptions, food delivery.
Student Beans is definitely worth a shout too. Different brands partner with different platforms, so if you can’t find exactly what you’re looking for it might be worth just checking elsewhere before you purchase. Takes a minute or two to verify and costs nothing!
Travelling Around
Above all else we’d recommend you get a 16-25 Railcard (you can get this on an app, so it still counts!) It costs £35 for an entire year, and gets you 1/3 off rail travel across the entire country – including some Underground journeys, definitely worth considering for when you need to travel home or see mates in different cities. Mature students are also eligible, just on a different card!
Citymapper is uniquely useful for navigating major UK towns and cities. It pulls together buses, trains and any other public transport into a route planner, updating in real time and far more reliable than Google Maps’ version. It’s a relatively new company, so it doesn’t cover all of the UK yet unfortunately, but over 50 million people use it globally so far.
Trainline compiles train tickets and prices from different rail companies all over the country into one, to save you time and effort checking multiple at once. Add your Railcard to it instantly, and you can also utilise SplitSave, where they book the journey as two separate tickets to potentially cut costs.
Money Management
Most banks will provide student card options, which will include zero fees, overdrafts and other app features. We aren’t going to give financial advice, we’re here to provide amazing accommodation, so we’d recommend checking out MoneySavingExpert, they know what they’re talking about and recommend banks depending on your wants and needs.
Splitwise is a bit of a flatmate essential, where you can log shared expenses and track who owes what across the whole group. If you do a group food shop or buy tickets to an event all in one you should try the app, it saves a lot of awkward conversation and means no-one is being left with a hole in their pocket!
We mentioned railcards earlier, some banks will also offer railcards for free with student accounts – keep an eye out!
For Food
Saving money and saving food waste all in one makes TooGoodToGo the standout option for foodie student apps. Buy food that hasn’t sold from shops, restaurants, supermarkets & cafes for a fraction of the normal price. Pick up a mystery bag for a couple of quid that could easily last a few days and would normally be several times the price – it is luck of the draw, but you can find some absolute bargains!
A lot of restaurants, both chain and independent, will offer a student discount. The well known brands might have it on their own app, or make you go through a UNiDAYS to claim it, but to support local go in with your physical student card and see if they’ll help you out.
Staying Organised
Firstly, check if your university has their own app! Once you log in with your student details it’ll typically give you your timetable, library account, campus maps and more all in one place. Download it and get into the habit of using it, it’s rather valuable.
Notion is a good choice for a flexible space to take notes and track deadlines – free for students and has a lot more functionality than a basic notes app.
We hope you’re excited to get going at uni! Keep your eyes peeled for our other student guides to help you put your best foot forward as you start your studies. And, if you’ve still not figured out where exactly you’re going to live, we can absolutely help with that too.
