Google Meet To End Unlimited Video Meetings On Free Versions Post-September

Tech giant Google has announced a key change to its Google Meet services. The company said that it will no longer provide unlimited video meet through Google Meet. The company had in April allowed unlimited video meet because of the pandemic. The company said that video chat on the free versions of Google Meet will be restricted to 60 minutes. The decision will come into effect after September 30. The company had way back in April announced that the unlimited video chat on the free versions was a temporary decision and it will be seized after September. There will be no extension in the unlimited services, meaning Google Meet users won’t be able to create free meetings.

During the five months window, Google Meet allowed users to create free meetings with up to 100 people. There was no restriction on the duration of the meetings. Besides, Google had also permitted all G Suite customers to access Meet’s advanced features for free. This will also be discontinued after September. The company will also block access to advanced features for G Suite and G Suite for Education customers after September. The company allowed meetings of up to 250 people and live-streams of up to 100,000 people in a single domain. Users were able to save recordings of meetings to the Google drive.

Google charges for providing these features to anyone. It offers these services to customers on the G Suite enterprise tier. The monthly charge per user is approximately USD 25. This was the first time Google was providing access to the service to personal Google accounts. According to Google, Google Meet grew manifold since early this year. It saw 100 million users accessing its services. Google in 2017 developed its video-communication service Google Meet. It was brought by the search engine giant as a replacement for Google Hangouts. Google has just launched a new feature in the Google Meet app, allowing users to chat with 49 people at the same time.