The milestone number comes after years of Google’s push to get Gmail, Drive, and Photos users to pay up.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced Friday that his company has logged 100 million subscriptions to Google One, its all-in-one subscription service that opens up additional storage for free services like Gmail, Drive, and Photos, as well as access to more features.
Hitting the milestone highlights the company’s efforts to move people away from its free plans, such as discontinuing unlimited Google Drive storage for photos. Google’s YouTube Premium service took nine years to get there, but it, too, recently hit 100 million subscribers, thanks to ad removal and extra features like music or high-quality streaming (and at the same time as YouTube made changes to crackdown on ad blockers).
The company had said it was close to the 100 million mark when it released its fourth-quarter earnings last month and revealed the billions it spent on layoffs and noted that again last week while launching an AI Premium Plan tier.
The new AI plan is similar to the company’s existing $100-per-year Google One Premium plan that comes with 2TB of storage and other features like VPN and dark web monitoring except it’s twice as expensive. It gives users access to a beefed-up version of Gemini, the new name for its Bard chatbot, and it will soon add access to those generative AI features inside services like Gmail and Docs.
According to the troubleshooting section of Google’s support page for AI Premium signups, users can’t subscribe to the AI Premium plan through Apple’s App Store payments, so to subscribe, you have to cancel that plan first. Also, it can’t be shared across family groups.
Correction February 10th, 2024, 7:44PM ET: This article previously said the standard Google One Premium plan is $100 per month, but should have said per year. That has been corrected. We regret the error.
