Digital Decluttering: Online Accounts, Again (Premium)

Back in September, I stepped back from my grand plans to declutter my online accounts. But Google may have just forced my hand. And now I may have to implement at least part of that account transition.

Here's what happened.

In early October, Google emailed me to explain that it had changed its policies for online storage associated with my Google Workspace account. More specifically that a new pooled storage feature eliminated the need for what it now calls legacy storage subscriptions. That sounds innocuous enough, but it's a huge problem for me because what this really means is that it's no longer possible to purchase
"individual storage subscriptions," which is exactly what I had been doing, primarily for Google Photos.

Worse, pooled storage is comically unsuitable as a replacement because it's so expensive: With this system, each user in an organization gets 30 GB of base storage. I had been paying for---and need---1 TB. And Google only offers a single organization-wide storage upgrade, and as hard as this is to believe, it comes with 10 TB of storage and costs $300 per month.

Yes. Really.

"If you have [Google Workspace] Business Starter [which I do], it’s usually more cost-effective to upgrade your subscription than to buy more storage," the Google admin site notes of this change. Yeah, no kidding.

This seems straightforward enough. I can just upgrade my Google Workspace Business Starter account ([email protected]) to a Business Standard account, right? This would cost $6 more per month, or $72 more per year, as that account type is $12 per user per year, and it does come with 2 TB of storage. So that would solve the problem and at a reasonable price point. You know, if I actually could do that.

The issue is that my organization---Thurrott.com---has 5 Workspace Business Starter user accounts, not one. And unlike Microsoft 365, Google makes it hard if not impossible to mix and match subscription types. In other words, I can't just upgrade my account. I have to upgrade all 5 accounts. And so the price would go from $30 per month ($6 per user per month times 5 accounts) to $60 per month for the whole organization, or an additional $360 per year. That would solve the problem but at a very unreasonable price point. That's a lot of money to pay for some additional storage, most of which I will never need or use. Way too much money.

As I write this, I see two possible outcomes.

One, there may be a way to upgrade only my account and, if so, I will take that option as it would be the simplest way to solve the problem and just keep using my [email protected] account for photos (and whatever else). I write may there because I don't actually see a way to do this. So the next step is contacting Google support and figuring that one out.

Two, I could simply move all my photos from my Workspace account to my personal Gmail account and just pay for Google One storage there, which is straightforward. (As you may recall,...