Giving people something for free and then slowly pushing them toward a paid subscription is a tech tale as old as time. But a group of people with decade-old G Suite (now Google Workspace) accounts have managed a rare victory: keeping their free accounts for, well, free. And because of a recent change, some are even getting extra storage at no cost — but it’s unclear what will happen next.
Now, some of those people with legacy accounts are getting more good news. Up until June 2022, Google kept letting legacy users add more individual storage to their accounts with a separate subscription. But in the past week, account owners who had opted to pay for that extra space started getting emails from Google saying their storage subscriptions had been canceled. They’d gotten a refund on their last payment, but the better news was at the end of the message: “While the subscription was canceled, your storage limit has not changed, and you don’t need to take any action.”
There’s no guarantee Google won’t change its mind in the future
Google spokesperson Jenny Thomson confirmed to The Verge that these users will be able to keep the extra storage space and maintain their legacy accounts: “Customers who received this notification will maintain their storage allotment and can continue using their existing account.” She tells us that the change also applied to people who had already migrated to Workspace accounts but still had user-managed storage through Google Play — according to a support page, individual storage won’t be added to pooled storage totals.
For now, it appears that people who have been holding on to free G Suite accounts for more than a decade at this point will get to keep doing so — with a free storage bonus, too, in some cases. There’s no guarantee Google won’t change its mind in the future, but until then, that’s a pretty good deal.