What a 5GB storage limit means for your new Google account

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?

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.

Where Google’s 5GB limit begins feeling more restrictive is for multimedia storage. A typical 12MP JPEG is around 4MP, which would be just 1,250 photos. I would easily surpass that limit in a year. Furthermore, modern smartphones can output higher-resolution images and/or higher-quality JPEGs. Photos I’ve captured on the OPPO Find X9 Ultra can average 12MB each, which would mean only 415 pictures under the new quota.

Backing up your video is even more restrictive. A conservative 10 Mbps bitrate at 1080p 30 fps yields 75 MB per minute, allowing for just over an hour of footage capture with a 5GB limit. For 4K30 at 40 Mbps, you’re looking at 300 MB per minute, or just 15 minutes before you run out of backup space.

A rough summary of what you can fit in 5GB of storage:

• 1,250 photos
• 1.1 hours of 1080p video
• 15 minutes of 4K video
• 50,000 emails (text/light attachments)
• 10,000 documents
• 1,000 MP3/AAC songs

Of course, people are backing up all kinds of things in Google Drive, a lot of which can take up even more space. WhatsApp chat history is a very popular example. I’m a pretty light chatter but love a good GIF, and I have over 2GB of my account backed up in Drive, which excludes video backups. For heavy users, Google’s 5GB limit renders WhatsApp backups essentially useless.

Likewise, if you store large design files, Colab/software development repos, video editing projects, or upload large datasets to sift through with Notebook LM, you’ll no doubt find that 5GB doesn’t last very long. Even my considerably more generous limit has become essentially unusable for multimedia backups after more than a decade of photos and video.

A downgrade from 15GB to 5GB is substantial, and Google’s lower storage trial is almost certainly restrictive by design. In its defense, it’s handed out an unfathomable amount of free storage that might simply be becoming unsustainable and uneconomical in the modern internet age. Google would also obviously much rather you pay for storage, and 5GB is restrictive enough that if you want media backups, you’re going to have to hand over your details and probably fork over some cash in the long term.

5GB remains generous enough if you just want a new account for email and document backups, but for anything else, you’ll want to reach for those 15GB free or paid storage tiers.