Getting organized costs time, and most of the apps that help with it cost money too. For a student, the trade-off is settled quickly: you stay with notes scattered everywhere and a paper diary.
Flots is now entirely free for students in higher education in France.
You have to be enrolled at a French higher education institution, and prove it with a CVEC certificate. Verification takes a few seconds, and is redone once a year.
Every Flots feature, free of charge
The student plan gives you the full offering at zero euros: tasks, calendar, notes, documents, projects, whiteboards, assistant. The list is the one from the paid plan, with nothing removed and no stripped-down version.
We chose this route rather than a discount or a limited edition, because an organization tool that is only half usable is of no use at all. A partially synced timetable is worse than no synced timetable at all.
Verification in seconds, with no middleman
Verification goes through the CVEC certificate, the one you obtain before each enrollment, either by paying the contribution or by being exempted from it.
You enter your family name and the certificate number. Flots queries the official service run by the Crous and unlocks the plan straight away.
Your name and your certificate number are used for that check and nothing else: they are not stored. And one certificate only ever unlocks a single account, which keeps it from being passed around.
Have your CVEC certificate to hand
The number is on the document you downloaded when you enrolled, on cvec.etudiant.gouv.fr.
Why the CVEC, and why France only
Checking student status usually means going through a paid provider. We would have funded a yearly contract for an offering that brings in nothing, and that cost would have landed somewhere.
France also has no equivalent to .edu addresses: relying on a list of academic email domains would leave part of the student population out. The CVEC applies to every student in initial training in higher education, and it can be checked against a public service.
The flip side is that this proof only exists for an enrollment in France. A student enrolled abroad cannot hold one. So the offer is announced as French from the subscription screen onwards, rather than being discovered at the moment of a refusal.
A status that renews every year
A CVEC certificate covers one academic year. Student status follows the same logic.
Flots displays the date up to which your account is free, as "Free until …". So you always know where you stand. As the deadline approaches, a new certificate renews the status: there is nothing else to do.
What it changes over an academic year
A semester fits into a handful of simple objects: a timetable, lecture notes, submission deadlines, revision to spread out.
Your institution's timetable is added to your calendar and follows the endless room and time changes. Lecture notes live in the same place as the tasks they generate, and submission deadlines go into your schedule rather than into the back of your mind.
None of this is spectacular taken on its own. Put end to end, it saves you from copying the same information from one tool to another for an entire semester.
To get started, using Flots as a student gives the full walkthrough, and revision schedule covers preparing for exams.
Your whole academic year, in one place.
