Comparison among various Google One plans and Workspace Individual plan

Most Google users (including all Android phone users) started up with the free Google personal account.

The free Google personal account comes with 15GB of cloud storage shared among various Google services including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Android backup, etc. Certain 3rd party applications such as WhatsApp also make use of Google cloud storage to host your account backup data with them.

Soon, you will find that 15GB storage is not enough to be shared by all these online services. When the quota is used up, it will affect your Gmail sending/receiving, Android backup, WhatsApp backup, etc.

One way to handle this situation is to open multiple free Google personal accounts, so that you can get multiple of 15GB cloud storage. Then, you can make use of separate account to store your photos and videos, to host your WhatsApp backup copies, etc.

Another way is to expand your Google personal account's online storage space by paying subscription fee to Google.

Currently, there are 3 Google One subscription plans (Basic, Standard and Premium), and another Google Workspace Individual subscription plan, as follow:

The One Basic and One Standard plans are just storage expansion from the free 15GB plan, to 100GB and 200GB respectively. In addition, you can share your Google Drive storage with up to 5 of your family members under Google Family sharing plan.

Google has recently restricted the Google Meet session hosted by free accounts to 1 hour only. Your online meeting will be forced to terminate after the 1 hour time limit reached.

With One Premium subscription plan, you can not only enlarge your online storage space to 2TB, but also entitled to Google Meet premium service, which expands the online meeting duration hosted by you to 24 hours. Other Google Meet premium service features made available to you including the ability to have breakout meeting rooms for group discussion, ability to stream your online meeting live to Youtube, recording of the meeting session, background noise cancellation for better speech quality, etc.

However, there is also a big jump between the price of the One Standard plan and the One Premium plan.

In between them, there is another plan called Google Workspace Individual. This plan comes with 1TB online storage, the same Google Meet premium service as One Premium plan. In addition, it also comes with enhanced Google Calendar, with an appointment booking system for people to book appointment with you based on your availability as recorded in your Google Calendar. The appointments will be updated into your Google Calendar as well.

The Google Workspace Individual plan also comes with enhanced Gmail service, with increased outgoing email sending quota of 2,000 recipient email addresses per day. The enhanced feature also include ability to send out personalized email to a group of recipients using its mail merge function. You can also send out emails with nice design using the available templates.

As such, it seems that Google Workspace Individual plan is a cheaper alternative to Google One Premium plan, with lesser online storage space, but with better features in Gmail and Google Calendar. You get the same enhanced Google Meet in this plan too.

Apparently, the Google Workspace Individual plan is targeted to freelancers, SOHO users, start-up entrepreneurs, celebrities, artists, etc. with features to help them handle appointments with customers, and to send out personalized newsletters and marketing materials using the mail merge function.

Anyhow, even though you might not make use of all the available features in Google Workspace Individual plan, it is still quite a significant upgrade from Google One Standard plan, and a much cheaper alternative from Google One Premium plan. It is also the cheapest plan to get the premium Google Meet feature that extends the 1 hour meeting limit to 24 hours.

All the 5 plans mentioned above are for personal/individual usage, with a general @gmail.com account name and email address.

There are also business plans, at higher subscription price per account, with more features and functions, which you can make use of your own domain name instead of gmail.com.

There are also plans for education institutions, NGOs, etc. which comes with additional features and functions, yet can be free of charge to the eligible organizations.