Google One Cloud Storage Now Open For All With Value-Priced Plans
The name change wraps in everything that was Google Drive before and adds in some new benefits like more storage for the same money, family sharing capability, and reduced-price bookings at hotels via Google Search. That last benefit is an odd one, but with so many people booking hotels online for business and personal needs, it makes a bit of sense. Users will get in the range of 15% to 40% off bookings via Google Search.
Over the past few months, Google has been taking all the subscribers for Google Drive and slowly migrating them over to One. Now all new users will be directly signing up for One rather than registering for a normal Drive account and eventually being upgraded to One. It's worth noting that my personal Google Drive 100GB paid account is still the old Google Drive so the upgrades to One are certainly not finished yet for existing users.
The new storage and pricing structure looks like this; a 100GB plan is $1.99 monthly right now and with Google One the plan is the exact same price. Rather than jumping up to a 1TB plan for $9.99 from that entry-level 100GB plan as Drive did, One has a 200GB option in between that retails for $2.99 monthly. If you spring for the $9.99 monthly cost with One, you will get 2TB of storage, twice the storage that Drive offered for the same money.
That price structure certainly makes Google competitive with the other big companies in the cloud storage industry. iCloud will sell you 50GB for $0.99 monthly, 200GB for $2.99 monthly, and 2TB for $9.99 monthly. OneDrive from Microsoft has a 50GB plan for $1.99 monthly, a 1TB plan with Office access for $6.99 monthly and a 5TB plan with Office for $9.99 monthly. Google certainly has the better options right now and its complete Google Docs Suite of productivity software is free for individuals to use. Dropbox also recently increased storage capacity for the same monthly cost.
The family sharing feature will allow you to sign up for a plan and then send invites out to family members that need to store content online. One thing Google hasn't given One
