Google Meet is now free for everyone

Google announced that it will be making its premium video conferencing service, Google Meet, free for everyone. Starting in early May, anyone with an email address can sign up for Meet and enjoy many of the same features available to our business and education users, such as simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view. 

Sure this is to enable it compete with its rival, Zoom, which has seen an amazing run during this coronavirus lockdown period. Zoom recently announced that it had surpassed 300 million daily users.

As of this month, Meet is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. And as of last week, Meet’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million.

Hitherto, Google Meet has only been available as part of G Suite, Google’s collaboration and productivity solution for businesses, organizations and schools. Going forward, Meet will be available to anyone for free on the web at meet.google.com and via mobile apps for iOS or Android.

Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product compared to Zoom’s 40 minutes, but Google says it won’t enforce this time limit until after Sept. 30.

Google also announced the introduction of a new service for groups and teams – G Suite Essentials. G Suite Essentials is perfect for teams that need access to Meet’s more advanced features, such as dial-in phone numbers, larger meetings, and meeting recording. G Suite Essentials also includes Google Drive for easy and secure access to all of a team’s content, and Docs, Sheets and Slides for content creation and real-time collaboration. Google will be providing G Suite Essentials and all of these advanced features free of charge through September 30, 2020.

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