Google's One AI Premium plan with Gemini Advanced is now free for students – for an entire year

Finals season is here, and students everywhere are inundated with exams, projects, and late-night study sessions. To help lighten the load, Google is making all of its most advanced tools available for free to students.

Free Gemini Advanced

Gemini Advanced refers to Google’s premium AI subscription tier, which grants users access to its latest and most advanced AI offerings. Typically, access to Gemini Advanced is only available through Google’s One AI Premium Plan, which costs $20 per user per month.

Also: Google’s Veo 2 AI text-to-video generator is now available – how to try it

However, on Thursday, Google introduced another option for students, giving them free access to Google’s One AI Premium Plan just in time for finals. OpenAI launched a similar promotion last week, offering US students free access to ChatGPT Plus during finals. 

Google’s competitive edge? Students who enroll before June 30 will receive free access through spring 2026.

The fun part: Perks

The Gemini Advanced plan gives users access to Google’s most advanced AI features, but what exactly does that include? There are so many features that I am listing them below, followed by an explanation of how I think you can use them for finals:

• Gemini in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides: Perhaps the best feature is that users get Gemini AI assistance infused in the Google suite of applications, which many students rely on for their everyday tasks. Some examples include Gemini coediting in Google Docs, analyzing and visualizing data in Google Sheets, and creating presentations in Google Slides.
• Deep Research: This agentic feature can conduct thorough research on your behalf, browsing the web and then including those findings in a research report with citations. It is meant to do what would take a human hours in just minutes. I can see it being especially useful for getting started on any final papers, helping you find sources to start your writing.
• Gemini Live: Google’s Gemini Live voice assistant sounds human and can have multi-turn conversations with you, be interrupted, and follow your non-linear train of thought. The conversational experience is so intuitive that it makes getting the assistance you need faster and easier. For example, if you are confused about a concept from class, you can chat with it like you would a tutor and get comprehensive answers. If you are still confused, you can keep going until you get the clarity you need.
• Canvas: The Canvas feature changes the interface of what you see in Gemini. Users can view the changes happening in real time, as their original content is still visible when the changes are being made. Although it can be difficult to visualize without trying it for yourself, the major difference is that the changes happen to the existing content instead of the chatbot adding the changes to a new version placed right below it. It is especially helpful for coding tasks, as users can even view previews of HTML/React code and other web app prototypes.
• NotebookLM Plus: NotebookLM is an experimental AI notebook that combines LLMs with user notes to further your understanding of a topic by providing summaries, answering questions, and even discussing your content with you. NotebookLM Plus offers premium, subscriber-only features and five times higher usage limits to some of NotebookLM’s greatest features, including Audio Overviews, notebooks, queries, and sources per notebook. NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews is especially useful for students because they can feed it complex research papers or class notes and have it read to them conversationally.
• Whisk: Whisk is a new Google generative AI experiment powered by Veo 2, which lets users create new images from text and image prompts. With Whisk animate, a feature launched just this week, users can now animate the images into eight-second videos. This feature could be a good, fun distraction after a long study session.

Beyond AI features, Gemini Advanced users also get 2TB of storage, which is a massive amount of cloud space. This can be useful for storing all of your project needs, including hundreds of thousands of photos or hundreds of hours of HD video, according to Google.

How to access

Signing up is easy. Students simply sign up for the Google One AI Premium plan on the Gemini for Students site. Remember that you’ll need to sign up before June 30 to get free access until spring 2026.

Also: Gemini Pro 2.5 is a stunningly capable coding assistant – and a big threat to ChatGPT

Even if you are not a Google AI user, this is a great opportunity to try it out for yourself and see if it’s worth the hype. You might also want to sign up for ChatGPT Plus for free at the ChatGPT Students landing page. OpenAI’s offer will last until the end of May, when students are typically wrapping up finals.

If you sign up for both, you can compare which you like better and see which is worth the subscription cost once the offers expire.

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