As part of the ongoing story, but that era seems to be ending. Going forward, you’ll only get 15 GB of free storage if you give Google your phone number—and this is for your Google account, meaning it affects Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos. For years now, Google has provided users with 15 GB of online storage free of charge.
In a fresh development, anyone who doesn’t provide a phone number will only receive 5 GB of free online storage. This was spotted by affected users on Reddit and it seemingly only affects fresh users, not existing users. Anyone signing up for a fresh Google account must now provide a phone number during registration to get 15 GB of free online storage.
As part of the ongoing story, it’s for verification of fresh accounts. Once verified, you are no longer considered an anonymous user—and thus you’re privileged to 15 GB of storage. Why does Google need a phone number?
As part of the ongoing story, that means you can sign up without a phone number, then add it to your account later to bump up your cloud storage capacity from 5GB to 15GB. According to GoogleWatchBlog (machine translated), this phone number verification can be completed at a later time.
According to the latest update, if you want more cloud storage on your Google account but absolutely don’t want to give away your phone number, you can pay for a Google One plan that starts at $19.99/year for 100 GB and goes up to $99.99/year for 2 TB (with first-year discounts available).
The report highlights that google hasn’t officially issued a statement or disclosure about this change, but this support page states: “Your Google Account comes with up to 15 GB of cloud storage at no charge.” According to 9to5Google, this page previously said “Your Google Account comes with 15 GB of cloud storage at no charge” and was stealthily changed at some point in March 2026, verified using Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
In a fresh development, this article originally appeared on our sister publication PC-WELT and was translated and localized from German.
As part of the ongoing story, he has been writing on almost all IT topics for around 25 years, covering everything from news to reviews and buying guides. Hans-Christian Dirscherl began his IT life with Autoexec.bat and config.sys, Turbo-Pascal and C, Sinix and Wordperfect.