Google is the latest AI service provider to court users in higher education. Starting today, college students in the US can sign up for Google’s One AI Premium plan for free, shirking the usual $20 monthly subscription fee until June 30th, 2026.

Applicants will need to sign up before the deal expires on June 30th, 2025 according to Google spokesperson Alex Joseph, and will need a valid .edu email address for verification. He told The Verge that students will be emailed toward the end of their plan, “so you will have plenty of time to cancel.”

The plan includes 2TB of cloud storage and access to an assortment of Google’s AI offerings that aim to help students “study smarter.” Google One AI Premium includes Gemini 2.5 Pro-powered tools like Gemini Advanced, which is Google’s competitor to ChatGPT Plus, and Gemini Deep Research features that can be used to summarize complex topics and convert reports into a podcast-style audio format.

Users can also access NotebookLM Plus for more studying and audio summarization features, and integrate Google’s Gemini assistant directly into Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Some new tools are also included, such as Google’s new Veo 2 text-to-video AI model, and Whisk, which allows users to “mix text and image prompts to create something new.”

OpenAI and Anthropic have announced their own education initiatives this month, similarly hoping to attract students with a free taste of their AI tools. Academia is an important market, so it’s hardly surprising that Google has thrown its own hat in the ring, especially with AI being the biggest threat to its web search empire.

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