Orientation — What You Have

Every horror story about cloud billing starts with someone who skipped this hour. You just got handed a year of free compute, which means you are now a person with a budget, and budgets get spent by people who never look at them. Set the alerts before you do anything interesting, because the alternative is learning your spend rate from an email you did not want.

• Redeem the Google AI Pro student offer and confirm the subscription is active.
• Activate the $10/month developer credits and state which service they route through.
• Configure Google Cloud budget alerts at 50% and 90% before running any billable job.
• Explain what a budget alert does, what it does not do, and what fills that gap.
• Name what the credits do not cover.

Twelve months of Google AI Pro at no cost — the same plan that normally runs $19.99/month. It carries:

• Gemini Advanced — Gemini 3.1 Pro, Deep Research, and a 1M+ token context window.
• 5 TB of storage shared across Drive, Gmail, and Photos.
• NotebookLM Pro, Gemini Live, and image and video generation.
• $10/month in Google Cloud credits — $120 across the year, routed through Vertex AI. Activate at developers.google.com/profile after sign-up.

Separately, every new Google Cloud account gets a $300 free trial. That is additive, not instead of.

PhD students can apply for Research Credits — up to $1,000/year for coursework-adjacent projects — at edu.google.com/programs/credits/research with a short proposal.

The offer is currently US-only for new sign-ups, and it auto-renews at $19.99/month unless you cancel before the twelve months are up.

A pricing table tells you what a million tokens costs; §4.6 tells you whether your workload is a million tokens or a hundred million, which is the number that actually decides things. Cost literacy comes before tooling because every tool decision after this one is quietly a spending decision.

The curriculum's treatment is §4.6, Cost literacy: tokens, context windows, and the $200 question. Read it alongside this unit — it is the difference between knowing a number and knowing what the number buys.

For where this track sits relative to your degree, §0.4 (Who this is for) and §0.6 (How to use this curriculum) are worth twenty minutes.

1. Visit the Google One Student Offer page. Verify your student status, add a payment method, and complete the flow. Full terms live in the Google One Help Center.
2. Confirm the subscription is active and note the renewal date. Put it in your calendar now — the offer auto-renews at $19.99/month.
3. Go to developers.google.com/profile and activate the $10/month Google Cloud credits.
4. In the Google Cloud console, open Billing → Budgets & Alerts and create a budget with alert thresholds at 50% and 90%.
5. Read the alert configuration back to yourself and confirm what it does: it sends email. It does not stop services. Spend caps became available April 1, 2026 — set one if your project allows it.
6. Note the two things the credits do not cover: they route through Vertex AI, so direct Gemini API calls made through Google AI Studio accrue separate charges.

An active AI Pro subscription with the renewal date on your calendar, activated developer credits, and a Google Cloud budget with alerts configured at 50% and 90% — set up before you have run a single GPU job.

• Your budget alert fires at 90% while you are asleep and a training job is running. What happens to the job?
• You call the Gemini API through Google AI Studio. Which balance does that draw down?
• What is the difference between the $300 GCP free trial and the $120 of developer credits?
• It is month thirteen. What does your current workflow cost per month?