Which vendors offer free or discounted student access, who qualifies, how long each term runs, and what to check before you attach a card.
Several AI companies now run free or discounted plans for students, and the offers are not comparable on price alone. They differ on who qualifies, how long they last, what verification they demand, and what happens when the term ends.
The terms also change faster than any article can track. Everything below points at what to check rather than repeating figures that may already be stale, and every plan links out to the vendor's own page, which is the only reliable source for what you will actually be charged.
Read the expiry column first. A free year is only free if you know the date it stops.
| Plan | Who Qualifies | Term | Check Before Signing Up |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google AI plans for students | Eligible college students. Tier depends on your country, and several markets are excluded | One year. Redemption deadline is in the dedicated guide | Your country's tier, whether your country is excluded, and renewal terms. See our dedicated guide |
| ChatGPT student offers | Students. OpenAI sets eligibility, and it varies by region | Set by the current offer | Eligibility, region, term length and renewal, on OpenAI's own page |
| Microsoft Copilot for students | Often through a school or university account, not a personal one | Tied to institutional access | Whether your institution's licence covers it, and what happens after graduation |
| Perplexity student access | Students, where offered. Availability has varied by campus and region | Set by the current offer | Whether the offer is live in your country, and what tier it grants |
| Claude (Anthropic) | Students on the standard free tier, or at a university with an institutional agreement | Ongoing for the free tier. Tied to institutional access for university accounts | Whether your school provides institutional access. Anthropic offers no standard student discount on Pro plans. See our Claude student discount guide |
| Free tiers (no offer needed) | Anyone | Indefinite | Usage caps, which are the real limit rather than price |
Vendor offers appear and lapse without announcement. Treat this table as a checklist of what to confirm, not as a record of current terms.
For the details of a single vendor, see our guides to the ChatGPT student discount, Perplexity Pro for students and GitHub Copilot for students.
"For students" means something different at each company. Some verify enrollment, some accept a school email address, and some route access through the institution rather than the individual.
Country matters more than most students expect. An offer that is generous in the United States may be a lower tier elsewhere, or unavailable entirely. Reading US coverage of an offer and assuming it applies where you study is the single most common mistake in this area.
Account choice matters too. A plan attaches to the account you claim it with, and moving it later is rarely simple. Claim it on the account you actually use for coursework, not whichever one you happened to be signed into.
Find out what happens when the term ends before you sign up, not twelve months later. Some offers ask for a payment method at sign-up even when nothing is due immediately, and the terms that govern the end of the term are set out in the sign-up flow rather than on the marketing page.
Vendors differ here, and none of them makes it prominent. Read the terms in the flow and note what they say for the plan you are claiming, rather than assuming it works the way another vendor did.
Then do the one thing that protects you regardless: put the end date in your own calendar with a reminder a week ahead, and note which account and which card you used. A student who cannot remember which of three accounts holds a plan cannot manage it when the term runs out.
Before claiming anything, check whether the free tier already covers what you do. Most of these products have one, and for a student writing a few essays a term the caps are rarely the binding constraint.
The test is whether you currently hit limits. If you do not, a paid tier buys headroom you will not use, and the offer's main effect is attaching a card to an account.
Some tools have no paid tier worth claiming an offer for in the first place. Our pricing guide covers where Google’s notebook product lands on that question.
These offers change the classroom in a way that is easy to miss. A class is now split between students on very different tiers, and the split does not follow effort or ability. It follows country, institution, and whether someone happened to see an announcement.
That has a fairness consequence for assignment design. Building a task around a capability that only a paid tier provides quietly advantages the students who claimed an offer, and there is no reliable way to tell from the finished work who did.
The safer design is to require a behaviour rather than a capability. An assignment that asks for source-grounded work with citations can be done on any tier, including free ones and no-account tools. An assignment that assumes long research reports or heavy generation cannot.
There is also a records question worth raising once with colleagues. Student subscriptions are personal accounts outside the school's control, so coursework drafted in them sits outside whatever data rules the institution applies to its own systems.
Verification methods sort into three types, and knowing which one an offer uses tells you in advance whether you will qualify.
Enrollment checks ask you to confirm you are a current student at sign-up, and are the strictest. They are also the ones that fail most often for part-time students, recent graduates and anyone at an institution the service does not recognize.
Email-domain checks accept a school address and are the easiest to pass, which also means they lapse quietly. If your institution keeps your address active after graduation, an offer may keep working for someone who is no longer eligible.
Institutional licensing routes access through the school itself, so there is nothing for the student to claim. It is the most reliable and the least visible: students frequently do not know they already have access to a product they are about to pay for. Ask your library or IT team before claiming anything.
That third case is worth checking first, not last. A student who claims a personal offer on a product their university already licences has attached a card to an account for no benefit.
Student status is the thing these plans hang on, and it ends on a date the vendor does not share with you. That creates two problems most students do not think about until they hit them.
The first is access. A plan reached through your institution generally goes when the institution does, and a school email address often stops working within months of graduation. Anything you leaned on for a dissertation can disappear during the window when you still need it.
The second is your work. Notes, chat history and generated study material live inside the account that held the plan. If that was a university account, you may lose the material along with the access. Export anything you want to keep well before your final term ends.
The habit worth building now is to keep source documents somewhere you own. A tool holding the only copy of your work is a risk whoever is paying for it.
Not every study job needs a subscription or a sign-up. The Chalkbox flashcard maker, study guide maker and essay outline generator run in the browser, need no account, and have no caps to hit.
They do less than a full assistant, and that is the trade. For a weekly vocabulary deck or a quick outline, they finish the job before a sign-up flow would.
For the wider field, our alternatives comparison and best AI tools for teachers cover what is worth using, and school AI policy covers the rules side. Once you have a plan, AI for learning by subject shows which kind of AI help fits each course.
Join the Chalkbox list for free printable packs and new tools — no spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Several run student offers, including Google, OpenAI for ChatGPT, Microsoft through institutional Copilot access, and Perplexity where available. Terms, eligibility and regions change frequently, so check each vendor's own page rather than relying on any comparison, including this one.
OpenAI has run student offers, but eligibility, region availability and term length are set by whatever offer is current. Check OpenAI's own page for what applies to you. There is also a free tier available to anyone, which may already cover a typical student workload.
Whether your country is covered, which tier you actually get, what verification is required, how long the term runs, and what happens when it ends. Claim it on the account you use for coursework, since moving a plan between accounts later is rarely simple.
Some require a payment method at sign-up even when nothing is due immediately. The terms for what happens at the end of the term are set out in the sign-up flow rather than the marketing page, so read them there and put your end date in your calendar.
Often not. Most of these products have free tiers, and for a student writing a few essays a term the caps are rarely the binding constraint. The test is whether you currently hit limits. If you do not, a paid tier mainly attaches a card to an account.
Design assignments around behaviours rather than capabilities. A task requiring source-grounded work with citations can be completed on any tier, including free ones. A task assuming heavy generation or long research reports quietly advantages students who claimed an offer.
Student offers change and lapse without notice, and eligibility varies by country and institution. This guide is a checklist of what to verify, not a record of current terms — confirm every detail on the vendor's own page before signing up.