FREE Coursera(must have verified student email)

[Merlin]

I recently tried signing up for a new certificate that was free before. Now they're trying to charge me. Even though Coursera is still proudly proclaiming that I have free access to these things. Anyone else experiencing this?

The courses are always free, the certificates are what they charge for. If you're in the free coursera for college students summer program, most of the regular course and specialization certificates are free (though not all!). The commercial certs are not included, so those remain at normal price.

It could be that you're accessing one of the certs that are not on the allowed list? Or maybe trying to access one of the free commerial certs from the education account? You can always try changing back to the regular version of Coursera to see if the problem goes away... Assuming you added the college program on top of your existing Coursera account, there should be an icon on the top left of the screen you can use to switch back to the regular version of Coursera. If you're using a different account and login for your school Coursera account, you can just switch back to your non-school account.