If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve used ChatGPT. But have you paid for ChatGPT? OpenAI offers a number of ways to do so, but the cheapest plan is $20 per month. It’s pretty steep, especially since the company continues to offer premium features for free users.
However, there are still plenty of features and perks exclusive to paying customers. If you’re interested in these options, and you happen to be a college student in the United States or Canada, good news: ChatGPT Plus is now free for you, for a very limited time.
Who is eligible?
You can only take advantage of this offer if you are a full or part-time student at a degree-granting school in either the U.S. or Canada. Don’t be dissuaded if you don’t see your school when attempting to sign up for the offer: OpenAI has a support link to help find or add your school to the list. This tool may also confirmed whether your school is ineligible. You need to be physically present in the U.S. (and its territories) or Canada to sign up for this offer, too—VPNs will not work, unless its a whitelisted educational VPN.
OpenAI says it’ll confirm your student credentials through a service called SheerID. If the service is unable to verify you through your school’s registrar office, or via your school’s single sign-on service, you may need to provide SheerID with extra documents to prove your eligibility. SheerID says it only uses this data to authenticate your eligibility for this promotion, and does not sell or share your data with third parties.
While you are eligible if you have an existing ChatGPT Pro account, you are not eligible if that account is through Google Play or Apple’s App Store. You’ll need to make a new account in order to get ChatGPT Plus for free. ChatGPT Pro users are also not eligible.
What do you get?
If you are indeed eligible for the promotion, you can claim ChatGPT Plus from now through May 31, 2025. Once you make your claim, you get two months of ChatGPT Plus for free. So, if you sign up on May 31, you’ll have free access through July 31. Once that period is up, OpenAI will charge you the typical $20 per month rate.
What do you think so far?
As said above, this applies to existing ChatGPT Plus subscribers, too. If you verify that you are a student, OpenAI will credit your account for the two month promotional period.
This promotion includes the full ChatGPT Plus service. That comes with all of the features of the free plan, including GPT-4o mini access, GPT-4o and o3-mini access, web search, file uploads, data analysis, image generation, and voice mode. In addition, Plus offers extended limits on things like messages, file uploads, analysis, and image creation, advanced voice mode with video and the ability to share your screen, deep research for more analytical queries, GPT-4.5 preview access, custom GPTs, tasks, and limited access to OpenAI’s Sora video generator.
How to get ChatGPT Plus for free
If you think you’re eligible, head to OpenAI’s official promotional site here. Once it loads, click either “Claim offer” button you see. Log into your account, then follow the on-screen instructions to verify your identity as an eligible student.