Google launches paid plans for increased Gmail and Picasa storage

by Brad Linder Aug 9th 2007

While Google doesn't offer online storage space for backing up your files or sharing media (other than photos and videos) with your friends, the company does provide users with a fair bit of online storage space. Gmail users get close to 3GB of data, while Picasa web users have 1GB of photo storage to play with.

Now Google has launched a new paid service to let you beef up your online storage for those two services. $1 a year will snag you 6GB of shared storage space that can be used for Picasa or Gmail. Or if you've got a ton of e-mail to save, you can try out these plans:

25GB for $75/year
100GB for $250/year
250GB for $500/year

If you've done the math, you probably realize that you can just sign up for 100 separate Google accounts and get 600GB for $100 a year, so the pricing seems a bit out of whack. But we'll just chalk that up to promotional pricing and the fact that there are plenty of other services out there providing 2-6GB of online storage space for free.

Odds are in the future we'll see other Google services added to this shared plan, including Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Update: It looks like Google has updated their pricing, and 6GB of online storage will cost you $20/year, not $1. We don't know if the initial pricing was a typo or a promotion that only lasted a few hours. But if you don't believe us, there is evidence that the price was originally $1.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

Tags: gmail, paid storage, PaidStorage, picasa

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

David Chartier said 10:43PM on 8-09-2007

No IMAP! Still! Grrrr

gojeda said 8:18AM on 8-10-2007

I....smell.....Photoshop.

Marty said 8:18AM on 8-10-2007

I don't understand this as Yahoo has just removed its space restrictions entirely for no cost after realising that people won't pay for more space.
So either you yahoo for free or pay to use gmail.

Web-based email is a commodity product these days and Google should be be smarter than this.

Also, why offer 3 times the space for primarily a text product compared to a photosite? If you offer far more space for photos, people will use it more, share it with friends more and the whole time have google ads in front of them.

But hey, what do I know?

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