Born in a dorm room.
Built for campus.
BestSchoolUS started because we were tired of emailing ZIP files to our professors and sharing tilde URLs that broke every semester. Two CS students, one dorm room, one very long weekend. Now 230+ schools and campuses — from Stanford to your local high school.
The problem
It's 2021. You're a sophomore CS student. You just built your first React app for a class project. You want to show it to your professor, put it on your resume, share it with recruiters at the career fair. Where do you host it?
Your university gives you a tilde URL — ~jchen.engin.umich.edu/public_html/ —
that requires SFTP, has no HTTPS, and breaks when you graduate. GitHub Pages works but you
need to figure out Actions, YAML configs, and base paths. Netlify and Vercel are great but
feel like overkill for a homework assignment, and the free tiers come with limitations designed
to push you toward paid plans.
We wanted something simpler. One command. Instant HTTPS. A clean URL. Free for students. No catch.
So we built it.
Timeline
Idea born in a UMich dorm room. First prototype: a bash script that rsynced files to a shared server.
Rewrote everything in Node.js. Added CDN, SSL, and a proper CLI. First 50 users (all from UMich and Purdue).
Launched Git-based deploys and the web dashboard. Crossed 500 active users. Won MLH Best Developer Tool.
Added team collaboration, analytics, and file hosting. Signed first department contracts (GT, UT Austin). Hit 2,000 users.
Expanded CDN to 12 edge nodes. Launched Pro plan. Open-sourced the CLI. K-12 school districts start signing up — Fairfax County, Plano ISD, Naperville CUSD lead the way.
Reached 8,400+ active projects across 230+ schools and campuses — from AP CS classes to PhD labs. Serving 18 TB/month. Still a small team. Still free.
Principles
What we believe
Students first, always
Every product decision starts with "does this help a student ship their work?" If the answer is no, we skip it. We don't optimize for enterprise upsells or investor metrics.
Simple by default, powerful when needed
Zero config for the common case. One command to deploy. But if you need custom headers, redirects, environment variables, or team permissions — it's all there.
No dark patterns
We don't inject ads, upsell aggressively, throttle free users, or harvest data. If we ever need to change the free plan, you'll get 6 months notice and a migration path.
Open where it matters
The CLI is open source. Our roadmap is public. Bug reports go straight to the engineering team. We believe the best developer tools are built in the open.
Team
Six people. Twelve edge nodes. Four thousand projects.
We're a small, focused team. Everyone codes (or has coded). Everyone answers support tickets.
Daniel Kim
Co-founder & CEOFormer CS student at UMich. Built the first version because campus hosting options were terrible. Still writes code most days.
Mia Hernandez
Co-founder & CTOSystems engineer who previously worked on CDN infrastructure at Cloudflare. Handles everything from edge caching to DNS propagation.
James Okoye
EngineeringFull-stack developer and open source maintainer. Leads the CLI and dashboard development. Previously interned at Vercel.
Ava Chen
Design & FrontendDesigner and frontend engineer. Responsible for the dashboard UI, this website, and the brand identity. CalArts → Figma → BSU.
Raj Patel
InfrastructureDevOps engineer who keeps 12 edge nodes running smoothly. Previously at DigitalOcean. Has opinions about caching headers.
Sophie Larsson
Community & SupportCampus outreach and support. Runs the Discord, writes documentation, and coordinates with university IT departments.
Campus Representatives
We have volunteer campus reps at 23 universities who help spread the word, run workshops, and give feedback on new features. Campus reps get a free Pro plan, a BestSchoolUS t-shirt (it's a nice shirt), and direct access to the engineering team.
Interested? We're always looking for reps at new campuses. Learn more about the program and apply →
Open Source
The BestSchoolUS CLI is fully open source under the MIT license. We believe the tools students use to deploy their work should be transparent, auditable, and extensible.
@bestschoolus/cli
The command-line tool for BestSchoolUS. 2,847 GitHub stars.
Contributions are welcome. We have "good first issue" labels for newcomers, and we're responsive to PRs. Several students have used BSU CLI contributions as portfolio pieces.