> The paid version last i saw was not available through an institutional license.

Does your institution have mathematica? In mathematica you can query WA directly, and it gives you as much (or possibly more, from how it seems to behave for me) computing time as people with WA pro subscriptions. I use it all the time for stuff like graphing complicated implicit 3d surfaces or doing multiple integrals, stuff where I know the relevant mathematica command but I would rather not type it out fully