Google Is Going to Start Cashing In on Your Old Photos

Hi all, Gerrit here. For years, people have been auto-uploading the hundreds of photos they take on their smartphones straight to Google’s cloud. It’s been an easy way to store memories and moments without clogging up your phone’s limited storage, leading to more than 1 billion people using Google Photos to upload 28 billion images and videos every week. Most importantly, it’s free—or at least, it was.

This week, Google said it will start counting new uploads to Google Photos against each user’s cap of 15 gigabytes of free storage with the company, starting next June. Once you hit that limit, you’ll have to start paying $1.99 a month to up your storage space (unless you're using a Google Pixel phone). That doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it could generate as much as $3 billion a year in new revenue for Google parent Alphabet Inc. by 2023, estimates Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik.