After announcing the service in May, Google has today announced that their new storage service, Google One, is coming to Australia.
Google One combines all your storage from Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos into a single service, with the option to share the additional storage you’re paying for with up to five family members. The service is summed up in one simple bill, letting you see all your storage and cost in one place.
Google currently offers 15GB of free storage for each user, with additional Google Drive storage options available. Google One will do away with the different buckets, merging them into a single container with different tiered plans and pricing for each level ranging from 100GB to 30TB.
Google Australia hasn’t announced any pricing for the Australian launch, but in the US, their 100GB plans start at $1.99USD, with 200GB costing $2.99USD and 2TB is $9.99USD per month. Google will offer storage up to 30TB and Google also updated existing 1 TB Drive plans to 2 TB at no extra cost.
As well as offering storage, Google offers additional ‘benefits’ including access to a team of Google experts who can answer any of your questions, including giving help recovering a file you accidentally deleted or teaching you how to use Gmail when you’re offline.
There’s other bonuses as well, with Google advising they’ll be offering ‘credits on Google Play or deals on select hotels found in Google Search’. Google intends to add on more benefits over time as well like deals on the Google Store and more in the coming months.
For people using the service there’s a Google One app available on Google Play to manage your account – though it’s not available to install for users here in Australia.
Google will automatically update existing Google Drive customers to Google One when it arrives ‘over the next few weeks’, with an email being sent to existing users when the update is live – so look out for that. If you’d like to sign up for Google One, you can enter your details on the Google One sign up page now.
Update: Looks like emails are now rolling out, this it’s what it looks like:
Oh dear – if they do offer “credits on…select hotels found in Google Search” for storage, I guess they haven’t learnt from the monopoly trouble they’ve been in in Europe
Got the email. I’m glad there will be a 200GB option. I’m approaching 100GB and going to 1TB is a leap! Having said that, a 1TB family plan could work too. Nice to have some options 🙂