Google One might be my most valuable tech subscription – thanks and no thanks to AI

Ben Schoon | Jun 9 2026 - 1:00 pm PT

Google One has long been offered as a way to expand the storage across products like Drive, Gmail, and Photos, but Google has been pivoting it towards a focus on AI. And while that’s compelling for some, the real value in Google’s AI storage subscriptions is now coming from everything else – and it’s simply one of the best deals in tech today.

Cloud storage is a big part of basically every tech product you might want to use in 2026. Google already offers far more storage than most for free, with most accounts getting 15GB of storage without any cost at all. From there, you can pay extra to open up a bigger and bigger allotment of cloud storage to be used with your Google account.

For the longest time, that meant paying $2/month for 100GB, $3 for 200GB, $10 for 2TB, and so on. And, while there have always been a few perks in Google One, the storage was the main selling point.

In its “Gemini era,” though, Google has rethought these storage subscriptions, and it’s a win for everyone.

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This is a thought that’s been bouncing around my head for the past few months, as Google just keeps piling on more reasons to pay up for one of its various AI-centric storage plans – and it’s better than ever as of this week.

Google One’s AI plans consist of AI Plus for $4.99/month, AI Pro for $19.99/month, or AI Ultra starting at $99.99/month. And if these were just for AI, we quite simply wouldn’t be having this discussion. Whether it’s ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, AI subscriptions have yet to prove their value for the general consumer in many cases. It’s a hard sell to fork over $20 per month just for the sake of more AI usage.

That’s where Google has really done a good job in making these subscriptions appealing, not just for the sake of AI.

Starting with the Google One AI Plus subscription, $4.99/month, which includes 400GB of storage, 2x usage limits in Gemini, and access to AI features you don’t get in base Gemini, such as Daily Brief. The AI improvements are welcome, but for many, just getting the option to pay $5 per month for 400GB of storage is a big deal. That sort of middle ground never existed in Google’s previous setup, and it’s not common anywhere else.

Google AI Plus gets price drop to $4.99 and storage bump

Google One AI Pro takes that a step further. You could pay $10/month for 2TB of storage, or you could pay $19.99 for 5TB – plus YouTube Premium Lite, plus Google Home Premium, plus Google Health Premium.

Split apart, that’s around $38 in monthly value. For $20. It’s an absolute steal.

AI Ultra is less of a great deal, at least for most people. For $99.99/month, you do get 20TB of storage, which is nothing to write off, but the rest of the perks don’t add up to the cost. YouTube Premium, Google Home, and Health only make so much of a dent in that monthly cost – you’re either getting your value here from the AI or from the storage.

But that’s really the point.

Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic, and everyone else in the AI world, Google One’s AI plans aren’t just an AI subscription. They’re valuable cloud storage, they’re a bundle, and more than anything, they’re just a good deal. I’d very much argue that, at this moment, Google AI Pro is the most valuable subscription I have, and it’s certainly not thanks to Gemini.

As the cost of literally everything continues to go up, Google One’s subscriptions are a rare place where I actually feel like I’m getting my money’s worth, and maybe even getting more value than I’m paying for.

What do you think?