Web giant Google is rolling out a revamp for consumer-facing cloud storage, called Google One, that will add in new features and storage options while bringing users’ storage together for all services. Storage plans will be cheaper and offer more, for starters. The big game-changer here, though, is that all of these plans, even the dirt-cheap ones, come with one-tap access to Google’s live support team at any time. All paid Google Drive storage accounts on the consumer side of things will be automatically upgraded to Google One within the next couple of months, but these changes won’t affect commercial G Suite users, who already have access to customer service through other channels.
Among the more major changes are new paid plans running from 100GB to a whopping 30TB. Two of the plans are getting a huge price drop, as well; the 100GB plan is only $2.99 per month, while the 2TB plan has been dropped from $19.99 per month to $9.99 per month. The 1TB plan that used to cost $9.99 per month will be gone, and the larger plans will remain unchanged. As a bonus, plans can now be shared, with each member of the share plan getting their own sequestered chunk of the storage on offer. Naturally, everybody who’s included in a shared storage plan will get access to Google’s live support reps, just as the main account holder or a solitary account holder would. Storage sharing does not mean storage duplication, of course; you’ll still have to allocate the plan between your members, so a 10TB plan could be shared between 5 people for 2TB each, for example.
This is a huge leap forward in user friendliness, since getting an answer about a Google product used to require posting on the appropriate product forum in most cases. The aforementioned live customer service is never more than a tap or click away while using supported Google apps, including Gmail, Drive, and Photos, for now. Details on how exactly this will work have not yet been shared by Google, so keep an eye out for more information on what the customer service will be capable of and if there are any real restrictions.