BU’s current storage of 6.5 petabytes would have cost the University about $900,000 a year under Google’s original cost formula, she says.

“Storage has been unlimited across their many applications.” Now, however, the company will roll out charges for storage consumption across all of the Google Workspace applications. “Google has had long-standing agreements with higher education for free use of their collaboration platform services,” says Schroeder. The BU Student Government Senate passed a resolution condemning “Google’s attempt to price gouge students for heretofore free services.”

The end of unlimited free storage, which Google announced last April, alarmed students and information technology administrators at colleges across the country. The services are used by all students and alumni, as well as some faculty and staff, says Tracy Schroeder, BU’s vice president of information services and technology. Google Workspace, previously known as G Suite, includes email (Gmail), content creation (Google Docs), and file storage (Drive). The four-year deal includes a free first year, meaning BU won’t be charged until December 2022. Now Google has announced that it will discontinue free unlimited storage for colleges and universities.īut the University has negotiated a whopping discount off the charge that the tech powerhouse had originally planned. For a decade, BU has enjoyed free data storage on Google Workspace, the popular suite of cloud computing tools currently used by 195,000 University accounts.

How much google drive cost