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The era of 15GB free Gmail storage is ending (Update: Google responds)
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this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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Anyone else remember when Google bragged about never being worried about storage as you watched your storage free count, grow and grow and grow.
TBF when Iade an account there to check it out back then, they offered about 1GB. But that was huge for the time back then
I remember when they offered 1GB, was at a time when I think the standard hotmail was like either 10 MB or 100 MB, and they made the announcement on april 1st.
Then did it via an invite system.
You know now that I think of it, I wonder what would have happened if google plus had used a similar playbook to that. Seems like with gmail google knew the "exclusivity" was a selling point. Facebook grew big via similar strategies (only these special college students can get it, ok a few more colleges can), meanwhile google plus was "HEY, USE GOOGLE PLUS NOW, Oh you aren't using it yet, we made your youtube account a google plus account now, so now you have an account please use it now!
While social media in general is toxic. I do feel design wise google plus was leaps and bounds ahead of facebook at the time. Circles is IMO the feature that would have made social media actually semi-useful. (IE post your video game content to gamer friends, fun activities to friends, and not putting any job risking content to bosses etc...).
Google Plus was invite only in the beginning, though
I think so, I don't remember how long that was. But I do distinctly remember the era where it was shoved down everyone's throat, which I have to say stuck with people far more. Telling people that they must use it, generated so much hatred for it it was insane.
They tried that with Google Wave.
I don't think marketing was wave's problem... nobody understood what the hell wave was. I used it for a few months.. and I can't tell you what the hell it was.
And that was the end of the wave for invite started social media.
Yeah, the whole 'you now have a mandatory account' made for a mad scramble of how to disable every possible scrap of data sent to them. It may have been some small push into the self hosting game too.
Fellow OG. I remember. The day it was close to hitting 5gb I was watching it like an every guy watches their car odometer as it hits some magic number. It was worthy of celebration.
1gb back then was 5x the allowed size for my exchange mailbox at work. HUGE!
I remember. I'm also paying Google $2 a month for 100gb. Fucking bastards. But can you point me to 100GB for less?
You're going to have a hard time beating $2/mo unless you roll it into something else like blackblaze ($100/year for unlimited storage), Microsoft office 365 ($100/year with 1 TB of OneDrive), etc. If your space is going to photos, the speed and responsiveness of Google photos far outpaces some of the alternatives (cough cough OneDrive).
Self hosting is a viable alternative if you're interested in having more control/local storage or if you are interested in this kind of thing and want to do it/dabble in it as a hobby.
I personally built a NAS, which will take far too long to amortize vs just paying $2/mo. I chose this route because I value a local backup and because a NAS can a bit of a lifestyle product. "It can double as a server!". Sounds fun, but I would want to build the thing I host which will also take time so... You could potentially build a NAS that will average out to $2 or less a month if you have spare parts or score some used parts cheap. Odds are that route could also be used for self.hosting.
If you did the annual security 'check-up' you got an extra 2GB (maybe it was just 1GB and I did it a couple of years).
I mean, OneDrive did the same, except their tactic was just to delete your files instead of store them, instead of increasing it…