Video calls had become the essential tool for us to organise calls, meetings or even webinars ever since the pandemic started. Unfortunately, for those who are using the free version of the Google meet, your group calls will now be limited to only 1 hour!
While Google did not made an official announcement regarding this, they had updated their “Plan & Pricing” details, showing that users using the free version of the meeting tool will have their hours limited to only one hour for their group calls starting 28 June.
According to the website, Google said that “Gmail users will have unlimited free group calls (three or more people) on meet.google.com through June 28th. After that, users will need to upgrade for web-hosted group calls longer than 60 minutes.”
This had previously been reported by The Verge, saying that Google had plans to implement this 60-minute restriction twice but delayed it twice. However, Google had not explicitly said the reason for it.
Google Meet was made accessible to all starting April 2020 and their initial plan was to implement the one hour limit in September 2020, in which it was delayed to March 2021, and subsequently to late June 2021 instead.
Despite that, it actually isn’t as bad as it sounds. Given 1 hour to host a 100-person meeting is plenty of time to convey your points across. If the meeting was longer than 1 hour, most will have lost their interest halfway through the meeting.
As compared to the other service provider such as Microsoft Teams, the time limit imposed is similar, whereas compared to Zoom, Google Meet is much more generous as Zoom provides only a 40-minutes limit.
For those who really need the service, it’s probably best for you to sign up with their plans. As a starter, the 24-hour limit will now be available with the Google Workspace Essentials and Workspace Enterprise plans, which starts from USD$8/month (≈RM33/month) per user.
What do you think about this? Share your thoughts!
