Is Google Drive free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —Up to 15 GB of storage, shared with Gmail and Google Photos
• —More space is only available as a Google One subscription — there is no one-time purchase
• —Business features such as shared drives and admin controls are Google Workspace, not free Drive

Where the wall is

The pool. Email attachments and phone photo backups count against the same 15 GB as your files, so most people hit the limit through Photos or Gmail rather than through Drive itself.

After that: Google One Basic, 100 GB for $1.99 a month. 2 TB is $9.99 a month and 5 TB is $19.99 a month; Google advertises a saving of up to 16% for paying annually.

Can you self-host Google Drive? No — cloud only

Google Drive is a Google service and cannot be self-hosted. The open-source options compared on this page — Nextcloud, Seafile, CryptPad — can be, in exchange for running and backing up the server yourself.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

When paying is still the right call

If your work runs on shared Google Docs and your collaborators all have Google accounts, Drive is genuinely the path of least resistance, and 15 GB free is more than most rivals give away. Staying and paying $1.99 a month for 100 GB is a reasonable answer for a lot of people.

What you are locked into

Docs, Sheets and Slides files are Google-native formats that must be exported to leave, and the storage quota is tied to the same account as Gmail and Photos.

If you would rather not pay: Nextcloud