As COVID-19 takes control of all online communication, free Google Meet users with personal Gmail accounts can enjoy unlimited group communication for the past year. However, the offer expired earlier this month and Google detailed the new restrictions.
When Meet became available to all users in April 2020, Google announced that it will no longer have 60-minute calls until September 30. The deadline for this all-day call has been extended to March 31, 2021 and again to June 30, 2021.
Google didn’t bump it again after June 2021, and free Gmail users are now forced to live with a large group that has reached their limits. “Calls from 3 or more participants” are limited to 60 minutes.
After 55 minutes, everyone will be notified that the call will end soon. To extend to more than one hour, hosts can update their Google account. Otherwise, the call will end in 60 minutes.
However, individual calls can last up to 24 hours on free and enterprise accounts. The Updated version mentioned by Google is the $9.99 / month Workspace Individual tier that just rolled out in five countries – Japan, Mexico, United States, Brazil and Canada. Workspace Individual lets you set up group meetings for more than 60 minutes in Google Meet, record conversations in Meet, and use noise canceling on the same computer. After updating the hosts, calls can take up to a day and more.
In fact, most users can cope with the one-on-one Meet session, but the group restriction might be annoying because more than 60 minutes of group / family talk is very likely. But creating another link to Meet shouldn’t be a inconvenience.
Meet, Microsoft Team, and Zoom all started as tools for virtual meetings that were adopted by non-commercial users early in the pandemic. Now that some of these free stuff are being taken away, it will be interesting to see which of these three video conferencing applications people will stick with.
