Paying for your Google Drive storage subscription will become much more straightforward next year. As Google intends for Google Play to be the main payment portal for Google Drive. The news comes from emails that are now reportedly being sent out to current Google Drive subscribers advising of the change which is due to take place starting from January. From then on, anyone paying for Google Drive storage will be able to pay their subscription through Google Play.
It is important to note here that this is largely relevant to those who actually pay for storage. Anyone who already uses Google Drive in a limited capacity, will be aware that Google provides up to 15GB of storage space for free. As to be expected, with no actual fee for that baseline storage level, nothing will effectively change that much for those users. The change is mainly intended for those who make use of storage levels above and beyond the allocated free storage. Which for users on the most current price-plans works out to be $1.99 per month for 100GB or $9.99 per month for a 1TB storage level.
The logic behind this move is to condense routes of payment to Google for its various services. So by combining Google Drive subscriptions with Google Play, users will simply be able to make use of the one overall portal to pay for most, if not all, of their Google-related purchases. Likewise, this does also mean that users will be able to use Google Play credit/gift cards against the payments for their Google Drive subscription. As such, from the switch over date, customers will completely be able to manage their Google Drive account directly from within their Google Play account, instead of having to be redirected to the dedicated Google Drive account page(s). If you are a recent subscriber to the service, then you may find that for you, this setup is already in place as it does seem that the migration to the Google Play portal is for existing subscribers. In addition, if you are already an existing subscriber, then you will likely already have an email about this in your inbox advising of the upcoming change.