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The Offer
- Google is offering free Gemini Advanced (AI) subscription through the finals of 2026. Plus 2TB of free storage. Available in the US only. Sign up by June 30, 2025.
You just need to verify via a valid EDU email address. Gemini Advanced typically costs $19.99 each month, so can be up to $280 value.
Our Verdict
Nice freebie, either for the AI usage or the storage benefit. I’ll admit that when I saw ‘2026 finals’ I was thinking about the NBA finals, until I realized they meant school finals.😂 Anyway, both are about the same dates with this freebie lasting through June 2026.
Hat tip to Joko
If I sign up for this promotion and have a certain amount of gigabytes in my drive or storage and have increased it/more than the normally free amount given at google sign up, such as through phone purchases or other promotions….. And I cancel and no longer have the Gemini added two terabytes of space would it revert back to what I had before sign up for the promotion or to the default free storage amount?
When my trial is over and I no longer have access to the extra amount of 2TB storage, will my account revert back to the amount of storage I had at the time of sign-up because I had more than the initial amount given when initially signing up for Drive Etc. because of promotions, phone purchases promos, sign, ups, etc.?
DP: I have email forwarding on my alum account which works fine, but would not send me the 2FA code. My community college email which is still OK worked, though.
Thanks DoC, saves me from having to pay for a 100GB plan and also comb through things to delete to stay under 100GB. As others have said it’s sophisticated bait to trap you further into the google ecosystem and at a higher priced plan.
How does this compare to ChatGPT for writing code?
I had to sign in under a different email (kept getting looped around) and then register with my edu. Then canceled the subscription autopay using the link provided by another commenter, references below.
https://play.google.com/store/account/subscriptions
You can then turn off your app activity so it isn’t stored and reviewed by wage slaves.
https://myactivity.google.com/product/gemini?utm_source=help
I keep getting a loop. It says I’m eligible for the student discount, I click continue and then I click verify student status, I click that and I’m back to the eligibility message again. Help!
Nevermind, I got it to work!
For other running into it, just start from beginning and continue button becomes upgrade button.
My rebill date is July 22, 2026. Incidentally, the NBA finals end in late June as well so it works for both NBA, NHL, and school finals.
Other than asking questions and getting more detailed answers than in the past is there a real world benefit to the AI portion of this for an average person that doesn’t have a professional or academic use for it?
This is a personal answer, realistically. I use it for trip planning and generating initial itineraries to work off of.
That sounds like a good use. It takes a lot of effort to do trip planning. I’ll give that a try next time I plan a trip.
That’s the exact use case I’ve found for it
Stuff you’re going to do be doing research on by using search engines and that’s broad and just pulling together stuff from various websites anyway and isn’t down to that many personal variables, etc.
Good bit of prompt engineering can lead to neat itineraries with what are pretty generic attractions, but still, that’s what I come up with on my own after hours anyway lol
The deep research mode is the biggest game changer for me.. it will take a question, set out a plan to research it (subjects to google and read), then do the research and write up a detailed report. Goes much deeper than the GPT listicles, gives you some rational and sources. I think it is pretty good at filling in the gaps if you have a decision to make. Could also be good at running churning related searches?
Deep research at least has sources but it won’t synthesize them well. For example, I asked it to run a correlation between two different stock tickers and it just gave general positive or negative without actually calculating the number.
I had a 200Gb plan which was upgraded to 2TB by signing up for this. I set it to cancel when promo is over. The moment the 2TB promo ends will my emails stop coming since I’m over the free space limit? Is there a grace period of a few days to allow you to sign up for another plan?
No grace last time I had this situation. Your Gmail stops working sometime in the morning (not exactly at the midnight) and you do get alert if you’re on android and you sign up for new plan then.
The only issue is any email sent to you between the moment it stops working and you get new plan gets bounced back and you’ll never get it. Word of caution there.
This time I’ll try to sign up after midnight but before I get alert to see if that’s doable.
Thanks for the info. That’s pretty annoying that there isn’t a seamless way to prevent emails from bouncing.
They purposefully made it that way so you are discouraged to downgrade. There is no way to downgrade while you can upgrade with a click. Loss of email is a good deterrent to scare people from ever downgrading.