College students can get a free month of Perplexity Pro - here's why you'll want to

If you're a college student with a school email address, Perplexity is offering you a free month of its Perplexity Pro AI tool -- and you have the chance to earn an entire year for free.

The company says from Sept. 3 to Sept. 15 college students with an .edu email address can get a free month of Perplexity Pro, and a discounted rate of $4.99 a month after that (usually $20 a month). 

Also: 5 reasons why I prefer Perplexity over every other AI chatbot

Even better, if more than 500 students from the same campus sign up, the entire campus gets a free year of Perplexity Pro. 

This latest offer comes a month after Perplexity offered a free year of its Pro tier to Uber One subscribers.

Perplexity has set up a leaderboard to see your school's progress. At the time of this writing, two schools, the University Of California, Berkeley and Arizona State University, have already passed the 500 signup mark. Five other schools are past the halfway point. 

In addition, students can earn rewards based on the number of other students they refer -- up to a $50 Amazon card for 50 signups and a $100 Airbnb card for 100 signups. 

Also: How I test an AI chatbot's coding ability - and you can too

If you're not familiar, Perplexity Pro is an AI tool that claims to offer access to "all the top models", such as GPT-4 Omni and Claude 3.5 Sonnet. 

Perplexity made our list of this year's best chatbots and did quite well when ZDNET's David Gewirtz ran it through several coding tests. Perplexity was our best AI chatbot for searching or exploring topics you hadn't thought about before, and answers almost always include a photo or video.

Perplexity has a free, base version that only gives you five Pro searches per day and the standard Perplexity AI model. Upgrading to the Pro version gets 300-plus Pro searches a day, the ability to select your preferred model language for a certain task, the capability to upload and analyze files, and the option to visualize answers using Playground AI, DALL-E, SDXL, and more.

Also: Can Perplexity Pro help you code? It aced my programming tests - thanks to GPT-4

To sign up, visit Perplexity's "Back to School" page and look for "Join with school email".