About This Project

The Thesis

Carnegie Mellon students and alumni already pay for an enormous amount of stuff and don't use most of it. Tuition, fees, and alumni dues fund software licenses, research databases, news subscriptions, a free city-wide bus pass, museum access, professional development, and lifelong perks — but the catalog of "what you actually get" is fragmented across dozens of pages, hard to discover, and goes stale fast.

This site is the catalog. The mission is a complete, public, always-current list of free perks available to Carnegie Mellon students and alumni — with a working link, eligibility tag, and a "last verified" date on every entry.

Why Now?

Catalogs like this have been tried before, and they tend to die for the same reason: maintenance is a nightmare. Links rot. New perks never get added. Within a year the site is less useful than just googling.

What's different: an agent can maintain it. Three small agents — one to verify existing entries, one to discover new ones, one to draft entries from raw URLs — running on a schedule, opening PRs that a human reviews and merges. The maintenance burden goes from "hours per week of unpaid drudgery" to "ten minutes of PR review on a Sunday."

This site is also a deliberate test case for agent-maintained catalogs. If a small agent fleet can keep a public-facing site fresh and accurate with minimal human oversight, the same pattern applies to dozens of other catalogs.

What's Not Here

  • Third-party student discounts — only Carnegie Mellon–specific perks
  • Expired or broken perks (flagged and removed)
  • Pay-for-placement — no business can buy its way onto this list, rank higher, or be marked "Verified"
  • Login walls — no account is required to browse

Community submissions are welcome and reviewed before publishing (see Submit). We collect an optional email only if you choose to give it when submitting or reporting a resource — see our Privacy Policy.

How This Is Funded

Two things, kept strictly separate:

  • The catalog is editorial and free. It costs almost nothing to run (it's a static site), it carries no ads, and — as noted above — nothing in it is ever for sale.
  • The project's costs may be covered by a supporter. If they ever are, that supporter is shown only in the footer, clearly labeled, as backing for the project — not a spot in the catalog. A supporter can never add an entry, change its ranking, or affect what's listed.

No targeted ads, no third-party trackers, no selling your data. Independent of Carnegie Mellon University — see our Privacy Policy and Terms.

How to Report Issues

Found a broken link or know about a perk that's missing? Open an issue on GitHub with the details. We review reports regularly.

Fork This for Your School

This project is open source and designed to be easily adapted for other schools. The architecture is a static Astro site, with an optional Supabase backend powering upvotes, reports, and community submissions. Forks can run pure-JSON with no backend at all.

To fork this for your school:

  1. Fork the GitHub repo
  2. Update src/content/resources.json with your school's perks
  3. Set your school's name and links in src/site.config.ts
  4. Customize the accent color in public/tokens.css (the --color-accent token)
  5. Deploy to Vercel or Netlify (free)

The entire site is yours to modify. If you build one for your school, let us know — we'd love to see it.

Technical Details

Built with Astro and Tailwind CSS. Deployed on Vercel. Agent maintenance (coming in v2) will use Python and Claude Sonnet 4.5.

Source code available on GitHub.

Contact

Built for Carnegie Mellon students and alumni. Questions or feedback? Open an issue on GitHub.

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