From March 31 to May 31, 2025, college students and above in the U.S. and Canada can claim free access to ChatGPT Plus. It’s a generous, and calculated, offer.
Why students?
They are the perfect targets:
- They’re the future users
- They’re more willing to try new stuff than regular adults
- They’re curious, willing to experiment, and might even find new use cases OpenAI hasn’t thought of yet
- Most importantly, they have a clear, strong use case: getting through school
Students won’t need to figure out how ChatGPT fits into their lives. The value will be obvious, and they’ll experience it day after day during a critical period.
Why now?
Because it’s finals season. OpenAI even says so on their website:
- Students are stressed and need tools that actually help. If ChatGPT shows its value here, the emotional bond will be strong.
- OpenAI avoids getting blamed for “helping students cheat”. Using ChatGPT to study for exams is different than asking it to do homework.
- Doing it over summer break wouldn’t work as well. Without real schoolwork, students would treat it more like a toy than a tool.
- Offering it earlier would cost more (we’re talking about all students in the U.S. and Canada here), while reaching students when they don’t feel an urgent need.
OpenAI is being efficient with both timing and cost.
Sidenote: students can also use ChatGPT to prepare for summer internship interviews. OpenAI points this out on their website:
Why Plus?
The free version is already good enough. So why give away Plus?
$20/month is not too much for most people in developed countries like the U.S. and Canada. But students are price-sensitive, and most people don’t pay for productivity tools unless they feel they have to.
Plus is a huge upgrade over the free tier. Giving it away removes the price barrier and lets students experience the best version immediately—right when they actually need it.
After two months, dropping back to the free version will feel painful enough that some will choose to pay. Or at least, they will consider it once they start making money.
Pressure on schools
At schools that still ban ChatGPT, students will now feel the ban even more strongly. Students who were already using it quietly will realize how much they’ve been missing. Others will hear how students at other schools are using it, and start questioning why they’re being held back.
With Plus, the gap isn’t just noticeable—it feels unfair.
Admins and teachers will be under pressure to rethink their policies. Banning AI will start to look like refusing to use calculators or the Internet. Now they’ll have to ask “How do we best integrate this?” instead.
OpenAI doesn’t have to fight schools directly. They just make the the ban look increasingly unreasonable.