On Friday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google One, the company’s all-in-one subscription service, has reached 100 million subscribers.
This service provides additional storage for free offerings such as Gmail, Drive, and Photos, along with access to enhanced features.
This achievement underscores Google’s efforts to steer users away from its free plans, exemplified by the discontinuation of unlimited Google Drive storage for photos.
We just crossed 100M Google One subscribers! Looking forward to building on that momentum with our new AI Premium Plan (launched yesterday) offering AI features like Gemini Advanced, plus Gemini in Gmail, Docs + more coming soon. https://t.co/m7zAVop7P6 pic.twitter.com/sMdwJeq0iU
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 9, 2024
Google’s YouTube Premium service, which recently also reached 100 million subscribers, took nine years to attain this milestone.
The success can be attributed to features like ad removal and additional offerings such as music or high-quality streaming. Interestingly, this milestone coincided with YouTube’s efforts to tighten control of ad blockers.
During the release of its fourth-quarter earnings last month, Google hinted at nearing the 100 million mark.
This information was reiterated last week during the launch of a new AI Premium Plan tier, which complements the existing $100-per-year Google One Premium plan.
The latter comes with 2TB of storage and features like VPN and dark web monitoring, but the new AI plan is twice as expensive.
Users subscribing to the AI Premium plan won’t be able to do so through Apple’s App Store payments, as indicated in the troubleshooting section of Google’s support page for AI Premium signups.
To subscribe, users must first cancel the plan through the App Store, and it’s important to note that the AI Premium plan cannot be shared across family groups.