Google’s quest to find revenue from something other than search advertising has led it in some interesting directions. G Suite is one of the most successful projects that has emerged from that effort, and the company has decided it’s time to raise prices.
Starting on April 2nd, the G Suite Basic plan will cost $1 more per user per month, up to $6, and the G Suite Business Plan will increase by $2 to $12 per user per month, Google announced in a blog post. The Basic plan gives users a 30GB storage limit, while the Business plan offers unlimited storage and adds better support options, as well as a low-code development environment.
It’s an interesting move, and one of the first to take place under new Google Cloud leader Thomas Kurian, who joined Google from Oracle last November in replacing former CEO Diane Greene. Google has mostly focused on winning big enterprise deals for G Suite services over the last few years, forging deals with companies that most assuredly don’t pay list price for G Suite services.
It’s not clear how many of the 4 million companies and organizations using G Suite are in the Basic, Business, Enterprise, or custom deal categories, but the move is a 20 percent hike on the costs applicable to both Basic and Business users. Last year Google disclosed for the first time that its cloud business — which includes both G Suite and the Google Cloud infrastructure services — was generating $1 billion a quarter, which is still a small fraction of the $27.7 billion Google generated in that same quarter from advertising.
The price increases bring the G Suite tiers roughly in line with the pricing for Microsoft’s Office 365 for Business plans, although there are some differences between the two companies in the features that are available at a given tier.
[Editor’s note: This post was updated to correct the percentage increase in the price for the Business edition tier.]
