Free Google Home Mini for Canadians

It’s not terribly often that a decent deal comes to Canadians. I mean, we see them all the time in the US – and yeah, we totally watch those special offers with envy unless we have a US credit card and address to use. But not today.

Today, until May 9th or supplies run out, you can drop $9.99CAD on a one month Spotify Premium subscription, log into your fresh new account, click a button, wait a few minutes for an email, and go straight to the Google Store where you can pick a Google Home Mini in white or charcoal, go to checkout, and see a total of $0 due.

I’ll admit it. I haven’t been a huge Spotify fan over the years. I messed around the with free/ad supported version for a bit a few years ago. I tried last December to do a family account, which was a massive fail. For starters, it told me I couldn’t add my wife because we were in different countries – but I was looking at her across the room. Then they have a policy about crossing borders that meant either my daughter couldn’t use it at school, or after two weeks it would change countries and bounce my wife and I out of the account. If your teenage high schooler goes to school out of country, you’re SOL with Spotify. So we stuck with Google Play Music, because the Family subscription just flat out worked. For all of us.

But even with a short few hours with the new account, I have to say I’m impressed with how far they’ve come with their app – and how it connects to the web player. I was using the web player in the background at work, and I could control it from my phone. And it has very minimal lag. I can’t do that with Google Play Music.

Then there’s the current state of Google’s … well, everything. I’m sure you’ve heard that Google is replacing GPM with YouTube Music at some point in the near future. And the YT Music app SUCKS! It’s TERRIBLE!

So the timing on this is rather unfortunate for Google. Because right now, between shuttering Inbox (which I didn’t really use, but many people did), shutting down the goo.gl URL shortener, axing Allo (which really didn’t deserve to live in the first place, to be fair), and … oh yeah, closing down Google+ – which I lived on more than any other platform – you’ll excuse me if I don’t have much faith in the Google ecosystem these days.

Right now, I’m going to give it a month and see how life with Spotify is for me. I spent a whopping $9.99 and got this:

I think that’s a better opening offer than even 6 or 7 months of Premium free – because I’ll have another Mini, which I was intending to get at some point when they came on sale again anyway, for years to come.

So I’ve never been a Spotify fanboy, I’m not commenting on the quality of their service, the depth of their libraries, and I’m not affiliated with them in any way. But a budget tech deal is a budget tech deal, and I call this a really good one for Canadians.

Snag one while you can!

https://www.spotify.com/ca-en/premium/