Storage

Google offers all users an initial 15 GB of online storage space, that is shared across three of its most-used services: Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos (aka Picasa Web Albums). Users can upgrade their free 15 GB account through a paid monthly subscription plan to get additional storage. Documents using Google Docs native formats (including .gdoc, .gslides, and .gsheet) do not count towards this quota. In Google+ Photos, photos of resolution less than 2048 x 2048 pixels and videos shorter than 15 minutes also do not count towards this quota.

As of 13 March 2014, storage plans offered by Google, are all charged exclusively in US$ so any customer outside of the US will need to pay exchange charges, are as follows:

 StoragePrice
 15GB Free
 100GB 1,99 $ per month
 1TB 9,99 $ per month
 10TB 99,99 $ per month
 20TB 199,99 $ per month
 30TB 299,99 $ per month

Google Docs initially provided 1 GB of storage for free. On April 24, 2012, Google Drive was introduced with a free storage of 5 GB. Other aspects of the service were changed at the same time. Free storage for Gmail was increased from 7+ GB to 10 GB. Storage plans were revised, prices were increased and were charged on a monthly basis rather than on a yearly basis. As per the revised pricing, $2.49 per month was charged for 25 GB or $4.99 for 100 GB.

Originally, Gmail, Google Docs and Picasa had separate allowances for free storage and a shared allowance for purchased storage. From April 2012 to May 2013, Google Drive and Google+ Photos had a shared allowance for both free and purchased storage, whereas Gmail had a separate but automatically increasing storage limit. As of June 2013, both free and purchased storage is shared between all the three services.

In September 2012, Google announced that it was cutting the existing free storage from all paid users' accounts, so that a user buying a 100 GB plan will get 100 GB of total storage instead of adding up to the free storage.

On May 13, 2013, Google announced the overall merge of storage across Gmail, Google Drive and Google+ Photos allowing users 15 GB of unified free storage between the services.

On March 13, 2014, the storage plans were revised again and prices were drastically reduced (by 80%) to just $1.99 per month for 100 GB or $9.99 for 1 TB. This is much cheaper than competitor Dropbox.