Google triples free cloud storage to 15GB for all your Gmail, Drive, and Google+ needs

By Gloria Sin May 13, 2013

Google Drive_tier plans — Image used with permission by copyright holder

This story is part of our complete Google I/O coverage

Google I/O, the company’s annual conference for developers, is just two days away, and it looks like Google is getting the party started early by announcing some good news: your free Google cloud storage just tripled in size from 5GB to 15GB.

As if getting three-times the storage space for free wasn’t enough of a bonus, Google is letting you decide how you’d like to use up all the extra space between your Gmail, Google+ Photo,s and Google Drive accounts. After all, a user who depends on his Gmail account for school would rather devote more space for email, than someone who likes to upload a ton of mobile photos to her Google+ Photos account. With unified cloud storage, you get to decide on how to allot that 15GB, or buy more storage space that is accessible across your accounts.

Google Drive_Shared storage — Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you need more than 15GB of cloud storage, you can pay Google $5 per month for 100GB on Google Drive, or get 200GB for $10 per month. These prices are basically half of what Dropbox is charging for similar capacities. For example, Dropbox‘s free account starts with only 2GB of storage (though you can earn up to 18GB by referring many people to the service), but if you want 100GB of space you need to spend $10 per month or $20 per month for 200GB of cloud storage.

Google Apps users that use cloud-based software like Docs will also be getting a bit more free storage – from 25GB to 30GB – to store their files on Google Drive and emails on Gmail, according to the company’s enterprise blog.

It’ll take Google a couple of weeks to roll out this extra storage for users, so don’t start uploading all your high-definition movies to your Google Drive account just yet. As CNET mentioned, it’s hard to believe Google would randomly increase its storage capacity for consumers by three fold – and for free – just because it can. It must have some even bigger trick up its sleeves to warrant this extra free cloud storage for users, so stay tuned for even bigger announcements from San Francisco later this week.

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