It's the only model provider that has offered a decent deal to students: a full year of google ai pro.

Granted, this doesn't give api access, only what google calls their "consumer ai products", but it makes a huge difference when chatgpt only allows a handful of document uploads and deep research queries per day.

on aistudio the free tier limits on all models are decent

I turned on API billing on API Studio in the hope of getting the best possible service. As long as you are not using the Gemini thinking and research APIs for long-running computations, the APIs are very inexpensive to use.