Internshala offers a free year of Google AI Plus — with a catch worth reading first

The offer covers 12 months of Google AI Plus, Google’s mid-tier AI subscription normally priced around $59 a year. Users get expanded access to Gemini, NotebookLM, Google Flow, and an extra 400GB of Google One storage on top of their existing quota.

Access is tied to a single detail in an Internshala profile: a graduation year of 2026 or later. After entering that, users link a payment method, which Google verifies with a small refundable charge — around $0.03, or ₹2 on Indian cards — before activating the subscription.

That’s also where the offer gets less straightforward. The subscription auto-renews at ₹399 (roughly $4.70) a month once the free year ends, unless manually cancelled beforehand. The eligibility check itself isn’t verified against an actual student record — it simply reads whatever graduation year a user enters, which is why the offer has spread online as a workaround rather than a standard, vetted student discount.

Google AI Plus sits between the free tier and the more expensive Pro plan, and student-acquisition offers like this one are a common tactic for AI companies building habit-forming usage before a paywall kicks in. A deal that reaches non-students through a loose eligibility check still works in Google’s favor short-term, since a year of active Gemini usage is worth more than the cost of a support ticket disputing a self-reported graduation date later on.

A separate, legitimate version of the same offer exists through Handshake, a platform Google partners with directly for verified students and recent graduates in the US. The Internshala route reaches a broader audience because it skips that enrollment check, which is also the part most likely to change if Google tightens verification later.

For anyone weighing similar offers circulating through job boards or referral links, the pattern here is worth remembering: a workaround that depends on unverifiable self-reported data rarely survives long once it gets enough attention, and any deal requiring a live payment method on file carries the ongoing risk of an unwanted renewal charge if the cancellation step gets forgotten.