What you need to know
- Google One has achieved a significant milestone, boasting over 100 million paying subscribers.
- The milestone underscores Google's strategy to steer users away from its free plans, scaling back free storage offerings in recent years.
- Coincidentally, Google One's subscriber milestone aligns with YouTube Music and YouTube Premium both surpassing the noteworthy 100 million user mark.
Google One just hit a huge milestone with over 100 million paying subscribers.
Sundar Pichai, Google and Alphabet's CEO, announced the milestone achievement on X (formerly Twitter). He also hinted at capitalizing on this success by introducing the new Google One AI Premium Plan.
We just crossed 100M Google One subscribers! Looking forward to building on that momentum with our new AI Premium Plan (launched yesterday) offering AI features like Gemini Advanced, plus Gemini in Gmail, Docs + more coming soon. https://t.co/m7zAVop7P6 pic.twitter.com/sMdwJeq0iUFebruary 9, 2024
Since its launch in May 2018, the cloud storage subscription service has been hooking users up with extra storage for Google services like Photos, Google Drive, and Gmail. Plus, it throws in a few extras, like a VPN and dark web monitoring.
Reaching this milestone underscores Google's push to nudge users away from its free plans. In the past few years, the company dialed down its free storage perks, especially in 2021 when unlimited storage for Google Photos was discontinued.
Now, each Google account gets a 15GB freebie, but that's the total for everything. So, if you're loading up on Google Photos memories or piling on the Google Drive documents, that 15GB can fill up faster than you'd think.
Google One plans start at just $1.99 a month, snagging you 100GB of storage. If you're feeling fancy, drop $9.99 for a whopping 2TB.
But Google's not done spoiling you. The search giant just unleashed the "AI Premium" Google One plan at $19.99 monthly, packed with AI tricks. This upgrade throws in AI features like drafting emails in Gmail, whipping your Slides into shape, and jazzing up Sheets with data visualizations.
If you're rocking a plan with 5TB or more storage, you're getting a taste of these AI Premium perks for free until July 31, 2024.
Google One hitting that subscriber milestone aligns perfectly with YouTube Music and YouTube Premium recently crossing the same impressive 100 million user mark.
