Summary
- Google One has surpassed 150M paid subscribers.
- This is a 50% growth in 15 months, as the subscription service crossed 100 million users last year.
- Google One offers an AI Premium Plan with Gemini Advanced, costing $20/month, which has attracted millions of subscribers.
Google One reached 100 million paid subscribers in February 2024, within days of YouTube crossing a similar milestone. Now, 15 months later, the service has grown by 50%, surpassing 150 million subscribers. That’s impressive considering the service took almost six years to reach the 100 million mark.
When Google One breached the 100 million subscriber base last year, Google announced a Google One AI Premium Plan to celebrate the occasion. The plan costs $20 per month, with access to Gemini Advanced across various Google services and 2TB of storage.
Despite the steep price, the expensive tier seems to have worked with consumers, attracting “millions” of subscriptions since then, revealed Shimrit Ben-Yair, VP and GM of Google One, to Reuters.
Paid Google One tiers provide extra storage space, family sharing, priority support, and additional features across various Google services. In recent years, Google has locked many of Google Photos’ advanced features behind paid Google One tiers. The subscription does not include access to YouTube Music or YouTube Premium.
Instead, Google sells them as a separate subscription, which also crossed the 100 million paid subscribers mark last year. Earlier this year, though, Google did a YouTube Premium add-on for Google One’s 2TB and higher tiers, allowing users to add a YouTube Premium subscription to their plan at a discounted rate of $12 per month — saving $2.
Google also launched its cheapest Google One tier last year, dubbed Google One Lite. It’s available only in select countries like India for Rs 59 ($0.70) and provides only one perk: an additional 30GB of storage space.
Google can’t match Apple’s subscription empire
YouTube TV is the only other notable subscription service from Google. As of May 2023, it was reportedly the largest live TV streaming platform in the US, with over 6 million paid subscribers.
Even after totaling the paid subscribers across all three platforms — Google One, YouTube, and YouTube TV — Google should have an estimated paid subscriber user base of around 275 to 325 million right now. While impressive, that’s still nowhere near Apple, which had over 1 billion paid users across all its services in 2024.
