Google accounts now get 5GB of storage, not 15GB

Everything is just too good to be true.

Recently, people noticed that Google's support page for Google Drive now worded the storage limit as "up to 15GB" instead of just 15GB of storage for free accounts. It also says that you can "unlock 15 GB storage at no cost by using your phone number," so that Google can verify that the storage is being used once per person.

While it is frustrating to have Google continue to take away storage and benefits seemingly for no reason, it is true that Google is presumably experiencing the same scarcity of memory and storage, both of which are required to maintain data centers. There is a lot of upkeep required with this equipment, and it seems Google is hitting the limit of what they can offer.

Google has reported that there are 1.8 billion active Gmail users globally, which requires significant amounts of storage and processing power to manage the data. This equates to roughly 27 exabytes (27,000,000 terabytes) of data, given that each user has at least 15GB of storage. This number is also growing fast, so the cost of infrastructure required is astronomical. There are ways that Google can keep up their promise of 15GB, as long as they frame it in the way of verification.

This feels similar to when Google removed the promise of unlimited storage for Google Photos, and similarly when they removed unlimited storage for Google Workspace accounts. Even limited storage is hard to keep up with, but it is annoying that Google is backing out on their promises.

Google's 15GB of storage, while not going away, is being pulled back slightly, and its reasoning of growing hardware costs, while frustrating, has some merits to it. We will have to wait and see what Google does soon.