After the United States and Canada, OpenAI is extending its student credit offer to France. Since 3 November 2026, French students can verify their status on UNiDAYS with their university e-mail address and claim €50 in ChatGPT credits. A gift, yes, but above all another move in the race between AI giants to win over students.
ChatGPT for students: what the offer really contains
Beware of the word "credits": this is not a cheque to spend freely. According to Numerama, the credits mainly power OpenAI's "agentic" features, those that carry out whole tasks on the user's behalf, and only once the limits of the plan are reached. They cover Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, ChatGPT Work for long-running tasks, and ChatGPT for Excel.
Regular conversations are not affected: they remain unlimited on every plan, including the free one. The credits can only be used from ChatGPT in a web browser.
The conditions to know
- a valid UNiDAYS student account, verified with a university e-mail;
- one redemption per student;
- credits that expire 60 days after being applied to the OpenAI account;
- a ChatGPT Free, Go, Plus or Pro account, new or existing: no subscription is required.
Les Numériques points out that, for now, this is the only artificial intelligence offer on UNiDAYS.
A modest gesture against the competition
Numerama notes that the gesture remains modest. Across the Atlantic, OpenAI offers $100 in credits valid for a year, and Google is more generous in France with a one-year offer. Les Numériques describes OpenAI as "timidly catching up" with its rivals, well after the start of the academic year.
AI giants are fighting over students, and the battle is fought with gifts.
— Numerama, 3 November 2026 (our translation)
Who wins, who loses
- OpenAI gains verified student accounts and a habit of use, at a cost limited to 60 days;
- students who code or work in spreadsheets get to test powerful tools for free, with no subscription;
- other students gain little: their everyday uses (writing, summarising, revising) were already free;
- European players remain, for now, absent from this ground of winning over young users.
What it changes for us, students
The stake is not the €50. It is habit: the tool you master during your studies is often the one you keep at work. Student uses already raise deep questions. In our article on group work where students consult the machine rather than their peers, we saw how much AI changes the way we learn. Some institutions choose to set rules rather than ban, as in the University of Rouen's AI charter. And the gap between use and training is real, as our analysis of AI skills in Europe shows.
Our advice: take the offer if you code or work in Excel, but remember that a free tool is still a commercial tool. Compare, test several assistants, and never let a gift decide how you work.
Sources
Numerama, "OpenAI offre 50 € de crédits ChatGPT aux étudiants français", 3 November 2026. Les Numériques, "ChatGPT : OpenAI offre 50 € de crédits aux étudiants français via UNiDAYS", 3 November 2026.
