I thought that first. With the exception that they exactly leave the Onedrive storage class (1TB, 60$/year) out. If you are happy with 200GB, the Google offer seems to be a lot cheaper. If you need up to 1TB, you pay twice than for Onedrive. Theoretically you can even count Office 365 Home as a 5TB, 90$ option, which makes it even yet cheaper. However that's a bit more of an unfair comparison, since it would involve the hassle of using multiple accounts (and I'm not even sure if the Onedrive app would allow that on a single installation).
I think that microsoft did really good job with their Office 365 home package.
Each of the 6 accounts gets:
- 1TB for OneDrive
- Office licence
- 60mins for Skype
- 50GB for Outlook
Initially I wanted to go with the Google Drive because I'm using Android, but after trying android and mac one drive clients i decided to go with one drive.
Their support site is far more valuable than the landing page.
From the main support index at https://support.google.com/googleone/ here are various tidbits of useful content that the surrounding HN comments wished for (sorry, none describe the "expert help" available):
My guess would be a slow introduction of concierge type services linked into their phone AI thing that they launched 6 months ago to great fanfair, and a general move from software service companies (and my bank.) into offering concierge type services in general.
Banks have been doing concierge for ages, if you're at a "expensive enough" level (and it's not as expensive as one first might assume, my bank offers a full concierge service for 10 000€ / year that's basically "it's 2 am and you want something specific and you're wherever, call this number and we'll find it for you").
I don't think tech companies can compete with that; if you want a concierge on retainer you want a guy you can talk to and explain your weird request. Nobody is paying 10+k a month to get a "barely close enough" answer. I also don't believe that's what they aim.
Instead they intend to go for the "fake concierge, but close enough": tie-ins into all their sub products, in an unified subscription and interface, at a small fraction of the cost. Oh you want an hotel ? We have that. Renting a car ? Buying a musical instrument ? Make a reservation at a restaurant ? Done. Oh, you want that actually unique request that does not get enough volume by month to be a business on its own ? No, we don't do that, but here is the google search results for it.
In other words, I believe Google One aims to play in the same court as Amazon Prime.
Founder’s Club is a good example of the mid-tier concierge services, as it exists exclusively to provide concierge-like discounts for a specific demographic target at a significant enough to overcome the “not enough volume” concern that banks face.
These discount services have one critical weakness for most of us: you must spend at least 10x the membership fee each year on compatible services to benefit from the discounts. If you don’t spend at least $2000/year on eligble costs, paying $200/year for discounts rarely makes any sense once you add up the money saved.
Credit cards try to democratize through “points” but the same math applies when comparing to a debit card.
Yeah, the hotel benefits creep me out. At first glance, it’s an iCloud-like storage plan, fine. But reading more and finding the hotel benefits makes me think “oh right, Google wants to track everything I do online and offline and sell my info to advertisers.”
Yep it creates a direct connection between a cloud service and what you type in Google search box. That... seems strange. It make it sound like a repository for all of your data/activity on all Google services not just, you know, the data you upload to their cloud service.
Maybe they try to move toward aAmazon Prime-Style "one subsription to feed all your live-areas"-Service. Next time they might add pLay store-flatrates for books, video, music, apps and then combine it with youtube premium.
One is just the "in" thing like what "Cloud" was once. One has somehow equated to Storage in the Cloud that is accessible everywhere. OneDrive, OneNote, Ubuntu One etc.
$1.99/mo expert access seems like it could be a valuable selling point to sway older people over to Google One that have never used cloud storage much before. There's still people out there that don't know how to use Dropbox or Google Drive.
Well, poor customer-service is a longstanding complain about google. Maybe with GOne you now get some real human who takes care of your complain, before they ban your account for violation of what their AI Overlord told them.
In the near future, 2 people are on GChat, I mean Hangouts, I mean Duo, I mean Allo, I mean FB Messenger. And one of them is one of those people that can't use the shift key:
So does this mean that if I pay for this as an Android dev and I have Play store issues, I can talk to an actual human instead of to a bot that just sends the same auto-reply ? And does it mean getting actual answers instead of them evading the question ?
If you aren't in one of the small number of supported regions, you can't see this information. In Hong Kong, we just see a page that says "Google One is coming soon. Expanded storage, access to Google experts and more – in one shareable plan.
Be among the first to know when Google One is available in your area."
Isn't it obvious? "Google Drive is a storage service. Google One is a subscription plan that gives you more storage to use across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos"(from faq) One is storage and the other is storage.
It's also a perfect example of how product management works at Google. It overlaps heavily with Google Drive and Google Photos and it probably only makes sense to the people who worked on it. Don't worry though, it will get cancelled just as soon as anyone can figure out what the heck it's for.
Because valuation of a software company doesn't come from the products they offer, nor the current user base with credit cards on file. It comes from a perceived potential growth/platform/network effect so all of these companies have to pretend that they will someday be a panopticon that commands your entire life in order to keep that sweet VC money flowing in even if they just repackage s3 with a nice client.
Woah. I clicked the link and was logged in already. I'm sure I logged in on this computer (work) at some point, but I'm disappointed that session didn't expire. I can't remember the last time I logged into dropbox here, it feels like months!
I couldn't find anything about availability (24/7?), response times, or issue escalation for their 'experts.' If I got locked out of my account, would I still have access to an expert to help?
Google One = Google Drive + more space + Customer Service for around $2 a month.
Customer Service is not called Customer Service but Google Experts. What does this mean for actual service?
The thing I like/jumps out for me is no compressing of images. That is one of the reasons I decided to go with Backblaze for backup. I would still stay with backblaze as I am not so confident about Google keeping the product around.
"Your stuff, anywhere". I have managed to setup a upload workflow for Backblaze on my linux machine without going through a browser. Not sure if it is possible in Google One drive. Browsers crash/freeze at the most importune moments. Then I need to restart the upload and pray. There is no way to say upload only the diff (atleast as far as I remember). The extra upload just means increased cost.
Still somewhere, someone in Google has finally listened(?) to the community and heard that customer support is needed. This is an excellent step in the right direction, I suppose.
The no compression thing caught my eye as well, but then I started thinking-- if I actually started using it to archive ALL of my 42MP photos I would start running into the higher cost brackets, and I don't want to pay that much. I still need an archiving solution, but since my photography is only a hobby for me, I would only see using it to archive my favorite shots while I keep everything else on external hard drives.
In what seems to be a standard move for Google these days, the page contains no information about the product for me as it's not available in my area yet. Would someone care to post that information?
Everyone is so busy asking "what even is this?" that they're forgetting to ask the more typical question about a new Google product - "will this still be around next year?"
Your logic is sound, but is Google's? We all thought that a product based on top of their already-necessary spidering of substantial portions of the web -- Reader -- was also unlikely to go away, and look what happened.
I think that Google have passed Peak Innovation, and now all they can see is stuff other companies are doing and thrashing about going, "We ought to be doing that, too." Check in with MS to ask how well that works.
Does the pricing make sense to anyone? 2TB is is $10/mo but 20TB is $200/mo. That means on a per-TB basis, the bigger plan is 2x as expensive. And then the 30TB is 2x as expensive as 20TB.
To be fair, someone who needs hundreds of TBs of storage is probably using it for something they're willing to spend quite a bit on (my first thought is self-employed photographers).
They're trying to discourage large amounts of data in a single account, probably because the solution is currently engineered to scale in O(cN), where c > 1. Can't think of any other reason. If the engineering scales O(logN), you'd see linear pricing as a way to make a killing in bulk.
Not necessarily. Many people pay for 2 TB without actually needing 2 TB. I currently pay for Dropbox Pro, which has 2 TB of space available, but I'm only using 300 GB. I'm pretty sure that at this point people going over 500 GB are a tiny minority.
When you pay for 30 TB on the other hand, you probably need it, so their actual cost might be reflected well in that price. This is basically the long tail effect, so when you optimize the price for the majority, price increases are not linear.
Which basically every book on pricing recommends doing - pricing on value. People always apply Walmart style retail pricing models onto everything - including most entrepreneurs to their own detriment. Which is a terrible idea for software and most other non-retail/non-low-margin businesses.
Services usually offer convenience. If you don't care about it then you can already register on tons of sites with multiple accounts and get vast amounts of free storage.
This and they have been working on making many accounts hard for some time now.
> This and they have been working on making many accounts hard for some time now
I disagree with that.
The only "hard" part is stuff that absolutely makes sense during the creation part if you're making several: captcha, not allowing the same phone number to be the recovery for more than ~10 accounts, etc ... It's all very obvious protection against spam/mass registration, and if you are an actual person it takes only a few minutes to get around.
And if you go for paid accounts, all of those limits cease existing.
But beside that, once you have the accounts, it's all very friendly, the multi login where you don't even have to logout / log in other account / logout again / relog in first account, account delegation so you can have a master account with automatic access to others, library (apps, photos, ...) sharing, and all of that is on the free accounts !
It might be far from perfect, but compared to the other big ones Google is very friendly to multi-accounts users.
You can just register a GSuite Business account, with unlimited storage.
They have a fine print that says you need at least 5 users in your account or something, otherwise they limit you to 1 TB.
However they are not enforcing that limit and on /r/DataHoarder/ you can see people with dozens of TB stored without issues. And even if they start enforcing it, if you pay for multiple accounts it would still be pretty cheap and you don't get this multi-account management overhead.
> Lol, I would just buy multiple 2 TB subscriptions from different accounts.
If you don't mind multiple accounts and want to optimize on price, just get one 100GB subscription (for the expert help benefit), and lots of free accounts.
Typically. I guess this one has something to do with the target market. 2TB/10$ is still a reasonable offer for individuals. 100$/month would already be rather an offer for companies, and those might not care if it's 200 instead.
alone the 2tb at $10/mo is what me annoys way more.
I need 1tb of space for my images but having to pay $10 makes me feel strange (yes it is relativly cheap and i can afford it) but this non linearity is probably here because of some mix calculation they are doing.
> Dropbox offers 1TB for $10 and 2TB for $20. Google added another zero (10x as much for the same price).
2 TB on Google One is $10, which is half of $20. I don't understands what you means by adding a zero. Are you comparing the 20TB offer which is $200 and have missed the 10x prices increase too?
They put expensive pricing out so that the items covering 90% of their userbase look more appealing. Pricing 101. Look at any free to play game where you can buy in-game currency.
I've started to notice this sometimes. I kinda laugh it off but am actually terrified about how much thought I give to figuring out the optimal bargain offer for something I had zero need for.
The pricing is interesting when you compare it to G Suite pricing. For $10/user/month (with a minimum of 5 users) you get unlimited storage space. a pretty roundabout way of getting unlimited storage, but then you'd also save yourself $150/month or $1.8k/year
They're not enforcing the storage limit for <5 person accounts, either. My wife and I have GSuite+storage for $10/mo each and I've got about 4TB in my Drive right now.
Agreed. It didn't even make much sense a few years ago with products like the Xbox One or the HTC One. Heaven help us if Apple refreshes their Mac Pro as the Mac One.
Google One is finally available in my country, although I was hoping for YouTube Premium, which isn't available yet.
Things to note:
1. Google's Drive File Stream is still not available for normal accounts, only for GSuite — I wonder why, because Backup and Sync is pretty shitty, at least on Macs
2. GSuite Business costs per user about the same price as Google One's 2 TB plan and you get essentially unlimited storage, Gmail on your own domain, a better ToS
In other words, GSuite is a much better deal, the only annoyance for people that are into Google Photos is that photos in your Drive won't appear automatically in G Photos (not covered by GSuite, different ToS) ... but that's probably a good thing :-)
So I'm wondering, for power users that would want this, why bother with Google One at all?
Is the sign up box for a mailing list so you'll be informed when it becomes available in your country?
For me (Germany, mobile Firefox) it's completely overladen with animations that showcase all the wonderful file formats you can store on your cloud drive.
No, it does say anything directly along the lines of "get updated when available in your region", but if you read between the lines, it could definitely be understood that way, now that you mention it.
For those wondering, this is Google Drive's paid plans, but it has undergone a rebranding to emphasize Google's ecosystem. I can think of some reasons why this might be a good idea:
1. Your storage in Google Drive is actually not used only by what's on GDrive, but includes your emails and Google Photos. So it is more correct to deemphasize the connection to GDrive.
2. This is a good first step to unify Google's paid B2C services that it may want to offer, especially since G+ is being discontinued.
So looking from a single private user's perspective: Google One has best pricing, but no Linux native client and Dropbox has Linux native client and no flexible pricing.
Have you tried Nextcloud? Its slick right up until you get a few users that actually use all the core apps (contact syncing, automatic uploads, calendars, etc), then rendering the PHP login page jumps to taking 20 seconds of maxing out all CPU cores on the server.
Their IRC channel is no help in debugging. Disabling all apps doesn't help, looking at the php & syslog don't show any errors, and adding caching only saves a few seconds of rendering time.
Nextcloud has seriously lowered my standards for bad PHP projects, making most others look well written and decently documented/debuggable.
I don't understand why they won't develop a client for Linux. Is it that difficult? Maybe the code could be also useful for Chrome OS and I guess many Googlers use Linux, so it would be useful for them too.
I stick with Dropbox for the Linux support. It is fantastic. It works on servers, with no GUI, so I can easily sync stuff from my Windows Laptop and my Linux server, where I perform scientific stuff.
Hell even the Windows client is shit compared to Dropbox. I think it is because they want everyone to keep everything in the cloud - not to use it as synced backup for stuff that really lives on your desktop (which is of course what everyone actually wants).
We're also the only set of users that will actually saturate the oversold storage while still burning through that $2.50 worth of customer service with a single question prefaced with "hi, I run Linux."
Dropbox is ext4 only, which led me to drop Dropbox entirely. Not that I was a heavy user, but I've moved to self-hosted nextcloud which has been mostly fine.
390 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadEach of the 6 accounts gets: - 1TB for OneDrive - Office licence - 60mins for Skype - 50GB for Outlook
Initially I wanted to go with the Google Drive because I'm using Android, but after trying android and mac one drive clients i decided to go with one drive.
From the main support index at https://support.google.com/googleone/ here are various tidbits of useful content that the surrounding HN comments wished for (sorry, none describe the "expert help" available):
"Get Google One":
https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004013
> With Google One, you get more storage, help from experts, and extra member benefits. You can share your membership with up to 5 family members.
"How your existing storage works with Google One":
https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9004014
> You'll get storage through your Google One membership, which will become your new storage limit. You'll no longer buy storage through Google Drive.
"Claim a Benefit":
https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9003266
> Google One hotel deals depend on the day, time, and other factors. There might not be a deal for every hotel search.
https://support.google.com/googleone/answer/9080668
"Learn where Google One is available":
> Create or join a family; Use Google Play Family Library; Subscribe to the Google Play Music family plan; Use a family calendar
I don't think tech companies can compete with that; if you want a concierge on retainer you want a guy you can talk to and explain your weird request. Nobody is paying 10+k a month to get a "barely close enough" answer. I also don't believe that's what they aim.
Instead they intend to go for the "fake concierge, but close enough": tie-ins into all their sub products, in an unified subscription and interface, at a small fraction of the cost. Oh you want an hotel ? We have that. Renting a car ? Buying a musical instrument ? Make a reservation at a restaurant ? Done. Oh, you want that actually unique request that does not get enough volume by month to be a business on its own ? No, we don't do that, but here is the google search results for it.
In other words, I believe Google One aims to play in the same court as Amazon Prime.
These discount services have one critical weakness for most of us: you must spend at least 10x the membership fee each year on compatible services to benefit from the discounts. If you don’t spend at least $2000/year on eligble costs, paying $200/year for discounts rarely makes any sense once you add up the money saved.
Credit cards try to democratize through “points” but the same math applies when comparing to a debit card.
Expert access for $1.99/mo? Huh?
Is it that hard to include a sentence of the form "$PRODUCT is..." somewhere?
Don't worry, It will, too, pass.
In the near future, 2 people are on GChat, I mean Hangouts, I mean Duo, I mean Allo, I mean FB Messenger. And one of them is one of those people that can't use the shift key:
"Where did you put the pictures from our trip?"
"oh, gone"
"What do you mean they're gone?!!!!?"
This is such a bad landing page. I have more questions than answers.
It's Extra Google.
Could've been called Google Extra, but the word Extra has a negative connotation to it at this time.
...actually, even that interpretation seems applicable here.
Google One includes
100 GB storage
Access to Google experts
Option to add your family
Extra member benefits
Likely to help you back up and access your data, seriously.
So does this mean that if I pay for this as an Android dev and I have Play store issues, I can talk to an actual human instead of to a bot that just sends the same auto-reply ? And does it mean getting actual answers instead of them evading the question ?
It's also a perfect example of how product management works at Google. It overlaps heavily with Google Drive and Google Photos and it probably only makes sense to the people who worked on it. Don't worry though, it will get cancelled just as soon as anyone can figure out what the heck it's for.
Instead it's... something? A one sentence description at the beginning of the page wouldn't hurt...
"Dropbox is a modern workspace"
"Keep everything organized without breaking your flow"
I don't understand why these companies feel the need to describe their services in this way.
People know what Dropbox is, and people that don't know what Dropbox is, probably aren't going to buy Dropbox.
People don't land on Dropbox.com by chance.
In fact, when describing GDrive ir iCloud Drive or OneDrive, people say "it's like Dropbox".
I think this might be the same thing.
If you can figure out what Google One is you are a genius!
Customer Service is not called Customer Service but Google Experts. What does this mean for actual service?
The thing I like/jumps out for me is no compressing of images. That is one of the reasons I decided to go with Backblaze for backup. I would still stay with backblaze as I am not so confident about Google keeping the product around.
"Your stuff, anywhere". I have managed to setup a upload workflow for Backblaze on my linux machine without going through a browser. Not sure if it is possible in Google One drive. Browsers crash/freeze at the most importune moments. Then I need to restart the upload and pray. There is no way to say upload only the diff (atleast as far as I remember). The extra upload just means increased cost.
Still somewhere, someone in Google has finally listened(?) to the community and heard that customer support is needed. This is an excellent step in the right direction, I suppose.
Would it be possible for you to share your way of doing this? I would be very interested in B2 access without browser.
https://github.com/ncw/rclone
My skeptical meter just went off the charts.
What is new from that page?
I think that Google have passed Peak Innovation, and now all they can see is stuff other companies are doing and thrashing about going, "We ought to be doing that, too." Check in with MS to ask how well that works.
Aren't things usually cheaper when you buy bulk?
A business that needs 100TB (or whatever) has more to spend, and is much less sensitive to price.
When you pay for 30 TB on the other hand, you probably need it, so their actual cost might be reflected well in that price. This is basically the long tail effect, so when you optimize the price for the majority, price increases are not linear.
This and they have been working on making many accounts hard for some time now.
I disagree with that.
The only "hard" part is stuff that absolutely makes sense during the creation part if you're making several: captcha, not allowing the same phone number to be the recovery for more than ~10 accounts, etc ... It's all very obvious protection against spam/mass registration, and if you are an actual person it takes only a few minutes to get around.
And if you go for paid accounts, all of those limits cease existing.
But beside that, once you have the accounts, it's all very friendly, the multi login where you don't even have to logout / log in other account / logout again / relog in first account, account delegation so you can have a master account with automatic access to others, library (apps, photos, ...) sharing, and all of that is on the free accounts !
It might be far from perfect, but compared to the other big ones Google is very friendly to multi-accounts users.
They have a fine print that says you need at least 5 users in your account or something, otherwise they limit you to 1 TB.
However they are not enforcing that limit and on /r/DataHoarder/ you can see people with dozens of TB stored without issues. And even if they start enforcing it, if you pay for multiple accounts it would still be pretty cheap and you don't get this multi-account management overhead.
https://youtu.be/y2F0wjoKEhg
If you don't mind multiple accounts and want to optimize on price, just get one 100GB subscription (for the expert help benefit), and lots of free accounts.
I need 1tb of space for my images but having to pay $10 makes me feel strange (yes it is relativly cheap and i can afford it) but this non linearity is probably here because of some mix calculation they are doing.
Dropbox offers 1TB for $10 and 2TB for $20. Google added another zero (10x as much for the same price).
Dropbox was definitely the first to offer a viable cloud storage, but they've always offered laughable storage plans (compared to their competition).
2 TB on Google One is $10, which is half of $20. I don't understands what you means by adding a zero. Are you comparing the 20TB offer which is $200 and have missed the 10x prices increase too?
[poor man's offer] [crap offer] [real offer] [expensive crap offer]
Things to note:
1. Google's Drive File Stream is still not available for normal accounts, only for GSuite — I wonder why, because Backup and Sync is pretty shitty, at least on Macs
2. GSuite Business costs per user about the same price as Google One's 2 TB plan and you get essentially unlimited storage, Gmail on your own domain, a better ToS
In other words, GSuite is a much better deal, the only annoyance for people that are into Google Photos is that photos in your Drive won't appear automatically in G Photos (not covered by GSuite, different ToS) ... but that's probably a good thing :-)
So I'm wondering, for power users that would want this, why bother with Google One at all?
IMO it's targeting a few groups:
- Grandpa who wants to see all the family photos and is not completely behind technically
- Grandpa's kids who are tired of being tech support for him and also probably have lots of photos they would happily store with Google
- Generally, people 30-50 who want simple "just works" tech and probably will use the hotel discounts
A logo
A headline
Two short sentences
A sign up box
A note saying that paying customers will eventually automatically be upgraded.
That's it.
No pictures. No movies. No backgrounds. No parallax. No nothing.
Did they completely change the landing page since this was posted 20 minutes ago?
For me (Germany, mobile Firefox) it's completely overladen with animations that showcase all the wonderful file formats you can store on your cloud drive.
I'm visiting from Scandinavia.
https://imgur.com/a/xsF1ZX3
Say if you get the 2 TB plan, will each family member get 2 TB, or will that 2 TB be shared between all family members?
1. Your storage in Google Drive is actually not used only by what's on GDrive, but includes your emails and Google Photos. So it is more correct to deemphasize the connection to GDrive.
2. This is a good first step to unify Google's paid B2C services that it may want to offer, especially since G+ is being discontinued.
Their IRC channel is no help in debugging. Disabling all apps doesn't help, looking at the php & syslog don't show any errors, and adding caching only saves a few seconds of rendering time.
Nextcloud has seriously lowered my standards for bad PHP projects, making most others look well written and decently documented/debuggable.
Apple:
50GB for 0.99
200GB for 2.99
2TB for 9.99
Google:
100GB for 1.99
200GB for 2.99
2TB for 9.99
I stick with Dropbox for the Linux support. It is fantastic. It works on servers, with no GUI, so I can easily sync stuff from my Windows Laptop and my Linux server, where I perform scientific stuff.
I also pay for SpiderOak cloud storage but they don’t allow selective sync - you get everything mirrored on your laptop.
That said, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive are still useful on Linux laptops through the web app.
We're also the only set of users that will actually saturate the oversold storage while still burning through that $2.50 worth of customer service with a single question prefaced with "hi, I run Linux."