Granola for Students: Student Pack, Lectures and Limits

Accepted university students get 12 months of Granola Business free through the Student Pack, which Granola offers to currently enrolled students at accredited universities in the US, UK and Canada.^[1] Business normally costs $14 per user per month, billed monthly, so the free year is worth $168 by our arithmetic. Students who do not qualify can stay on Basic, which is free ($0 per user per month) with no card and no time limit, but shows only the last 30 days of notes. That limit is the real issue. A semester runs longer than 30 days, and December revision needs September's lectures. Skip Granola if you want audio to re-listen to. It keeps none.

What the Student Pack gives you, and how to get it

Granola verifies eligibility through an uploaded student ID, and you apply with your academic email. That address matters later, because the Pack cannot be moved to a personal email.^[2] Acceptance is not the last step. You still have to complete the upgrade checkout in Settings > Billing, or the coupon does not apply and the account stays on the standard trial. Granola calls the Pack a limited edition offer. Each accepted student can also refer up to 5 friends at the same university, and each of them gets their own 12 months of Business free.

The year buys time and depth. Business keeps your full note history visible, lets Granola Chat search every meeting rather than the last 30 days, and adds model selection in Chat, where Basic runs on the Auto model only. It also opens the paid integrations, such as sending a note to Notion one at a time or routing notes through Zapier from the desktop app. Capture is identical on both plans. Both get unlimited meetings, no minute caps and the same apps.

Otter.ai runs a different kind of student deal. Otter gives 20% off its Pro plan with a .edu email, which comes to $6.67 per user a month billed annually ($79.99 a year) or $13.59 per user a month billed monthly. That is a lasting discount on one plan that you keep paying, while the Student Pack is a free year limited to three countries and to applicants Granola accepts. Our guide to Otter for students covers its minute limits.

Plan for the end of the free year too. Granola sells no annual Business plan, so keeping Business means paying monthly. Cancelling keeps the paid plan to the end of the billing period, then the workspace moves to Basic, where notes older than 30 days are hidden but not deleted, and they return if you upgrade again. That makes paying only in heavy months workable: six exam and project months cost $84 by our arithmetic, against $168 for a full year.

Lectures and seminars: laptop first, phone for the room

The Mac app (macOS 14 or later) and the Windows app (Windows 10 or later) capture your microphone and your computer's system audio together. No bot joins anything. In a lecture hall the microphone picks up the lecturer, and Granola notes that quality depends on distance and background noise. Everything the microphone hears is labeled as you, including other people in the room, and speaker tags cannot separate voices that share one microphone. A seminar discussion therefore comes out as one undivided stream.

Online classes on Zoom, Google Meet or Teams need the laptop. The desktop apps capture any call you can hear, as host or guest, without the host's permission. The phone apps cannot capture virtual-meeting audio at all, because phones do not let one app record another. Recorded lectures follow the same logic. The desktop app transcribes any audio playing on the computer, such as a lecture video, but Granola cannot import an audio or video file, so a recording is only transcribed while it plays.

Granola never starts on its own. You click New Note, accept the notification it shows one minute before a calendar meeting with two or more attendees, or open the event's note after it starts. Desktop transcription stops after 15 minutes without new audio, so a long seminar break can end the capture; you can resume on the same note. Back-to-back classes may merge into one note unless you click stop between them.

The phone covers in-person sessions away from a desk. On iPhone and Android, Granola uses the active microphone, built-in or Bluetooth, caches the audio during the session, transcribes it after you tap end, then deletes it. Notes take longer than on desktop and label speakers as Speaker A and Speaker B. Two Android edges matter in class: recordings under about 5 minutes may not generate notes, and recordings of roughly 10 hours or more may fail to process.

From rough notes to revision material

During class you type what you would normally type, and Granola enhances it from the transcript afterwards. Your own words stay black and AI additions appear gray, so your understanding stays separate from the machine's summary. A Zoom In view shows the transcript quotes behind a line. Use it to check a definition before it goes into an essay. Custom templates, for example one shaped for lecture notes, are created and applied only in the desktop apps.

Recipes are saved prompts you reuse in Chat, on every plan. A recipe covers one meeting or several, so a prompt that turns a lecture into practice questions can run on today's class or a whole week. Granola Chat answers with cited sources and can be scoped to one meeting, a folder, selected meetings or everything. Give each course its own folder and you can question the whole course before an exam. On Basic that reach stops at 30 days.

International students get more than 30 transcription languages on desktop and 17 on mobile, though the interface is English only. Desktop Multi-language mode can switch languages mid-session, while mobile picks one language per meeting. There is no live translation: the transcript stays in the spoken language, and you can set summaries to English or ask Chat for a translation. Voice typing, a separate dictation tool for essays and messages, is a Mac-only beta that is free on every plan.

Group projects and research interviews

Shared folders are on every plan, so a project group can keep its meeting notes in one place. Folder collaborators in the desktop app see full transcripts. Someone who receives a single shared note sees the summary but not the full transcript, and sharing a note adds no seat. Workspaces are created only on desktop, and notes do not cross workspaces. A paid workspace bills every active member at the same plan, so read our Granola pricing guide before inviting a whole group.

Interviews for a thesis, a user-research module or a club project carry a consent duty. Granola joins no call and shows other participants nothing unless you turn something on, and the user is responsible for consent. Granola treats its automated chat message and camera watermark as notice, not consent, and advises asking directly. Say it out loud. The chat message works on Zoom and Teams through the desktop apps and on Google Meet through Granola's Chrome extension; the watermark needs macOS 14 or Windows 11.

Phone interviews run through Granola's built-in dialer on iPhone or Android, for outbound calls only; incoming calls cannot be transcribed. You verify your number once with a call and a 6-digit code, and the person you call sees your own number. The dialer works in about 40 countries, including the US, Canada and the UK. No audio is kept, so nothing can be replayed. Check quotes against the transcript while the session is fresh.

Privacy, FERPA and the age rule

Granola is not FERPA compliant and says it may not suit student education records.^[3] Your own lecture notes are not the problem. The risk sits with student workers: a teaching assistant or a student employee who discusses named students' grades should keep those conversations out of Granola. The same caution applies to tutoring sessions where a student's records come up, because the transcript and the enhanced notes both keep what was said.

Granola's User Terms say the service is not intended for anyone under 16 or under the age of majority in their jurisdiction.^[4] A first-year student who has not yet reached the age of majority where they live falls outside the terms, even while enrolled at an eligible university. Check before applying. Data lives on AWS in the United States, with no EU, UK or other regional residency, which matters for students in the UK and Canada.

Granola trains its own models on anonymized data unless each user opts out, and opting out does not undo past use. Sign-in runs through Google, Microsoft or SSO, with no built-in two-factor authentication, so your university or personal account's security is Granola's security. Calendar sync covers Google Calendar and cloud Microsoft 365 Outlook only. A timetable kept in Apple Calendar will not appear.

The bottom line

Granola fits students who take notes in lectures, online classes and interviews and want them searchable for a whole term. The Student Pack's free year of Business is the reason to apply, because Basic's 30-day window is shorter than any semester. Use the laptop for online classes and the phone for rooms, ask before capturing other people, and keep education records out of it. Students outside the US, UK and Canada, anyone under the age of majority, and anyone who needs to replay audio or transcribe recorded files should look elsewhere.