GoKawiilRobert Triggs / Android Authority
The era of 15GB free Gmail storage is ending — at least if you’re not willing to give Google your phone number. Instead, Google is trialing a far lower 5GB storage limit for new accounts opened in select regions, which has understandably upset the apple cart. Thankfully, existing users keep their 15GB free usage.
Whether this becomes a permanent limitation for all future Google signups remains to be seen, but the writing is on the wall: Google is making its free storage tier harder to use in the long term unless you’re willing to verify your identity with one of the internet’s most notorious data-gatherers.
But what if you don’t want to give up your phone number, need a secondary account for a side-project, or just want a backup email address? How far can 5GB really take you before you Google starts badgering you to upgrade to a paid Google One plan?
How long can 5GB of storage last?
Robert Triggs / Android Authority
I’ve had a Google account for longer than I can remember, and I’ve been warned for years that I’m approaching my comparatively generous 17GB storage limit. It’s hard to imagine how I’d get by with just 5GB. After digging into my storage metrics, I found that the bulk of my storage space is occupied by Google Photos. Rather than pay up, I’ve moved most of my photos to my NAS, but imagine most people’s cloud storage is eaten up by photo backups. If I were using this cloud storage for just emails and documents, I’d still be well under the 5GB limit.
I have 11,000+ emails in this account dating back well over a decade (I should really clean this out), totaling 941MB of space. That averages out to just 86 KB per email. Extrapolated out to 5GB, that’s around 58,140 emails, more than enough for even the heaviest of users. Of course, this will vary a lot depending on whether you receive heavy attachments or mostly plain-text emails, but 5GB remains a very generous free tier if you’re primarily looking for an email account.
The same goes for document storage. Text documents, spreadsheets, and even PDFs are typically under 0.5MB each. So again, 5GB of storage works out to over 10,000 typically sized documents — though perhaps far fewer if you have media-heavy PDFs. Again, that’s more than most people are likely to store on a free-tier account.
5GB is bountiful for docs and email but restrictive for multimedia backups.
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