You can downgrade your Google One plan without outright cancelling – here’s how

One of the more insidious modern business tactics, is the intentional walls put in your way if you choose to downgrade a subscription or back out entirely. Many Americans are familiar with the runarounds and bargaining that cable, phone, and internet providers will try to keep you locked in — but now this often extends to purely digital subscriptions. Recently, for instance, I had to cancel a subscription with a certain unspecified fitness band provider, and what should’ve taken two or three clicks turned into an extensive survey. That’s not a way of encouraging people to come back later.

Google is guilty of this tactic too, but in an odd way. It’s actually relatively easy to cancel a Google One plan completely, say if you bought a Pixel 9 Pro or Pixel 10 Pro and no longer want the free AI Pro plan that came with it. But if you want to downgrade from that plan or some others, it can potentially be confusing, as if the only option is to spend even more money. The good news is that you can in fact drop to something more affordable — it just takes a few extra steps.

How to downgrade your Google One plan without canceling

Plus some notes on the confusion

The issue is that if you’re already signed up for an AI tier, a search for Google One plans on the web may only turn up ways of upgrading your subscription even further, unlike the screenshot here. If you think the 2TB version of AI Pro is expensive at $20 per month, Google is more than happy to sell you 5, 10, 20, or even 30TB plans. Those are probably overkill for most small businesses, never mind families or individuals. All my personal and work data can easily slip under the 2TB limit.

Likewise, in the Google One app for Android, visiting the Storage and Plans menus only presents a Get more storage button. In the iPhone app, even that’s not an option — the most you can do is go to Membership plan > Manage payment, which takes you to a webpage where you can cancel outright or change how your plan is billed. You have to visit the Google One website elsewhere for a complete set of options.

As a result, the simplest way of downgrading involves these steps:

1. On a Windows or Mac computer, visit your Google Home dashboard using a web browser. Sign in with your Google Account if you haven’t already.
2. Click on the Storage or Plans tabs in the left-hand sidebar.
3. Scroll to the Upgrade for more storage section.
4. If you don’t see the plan you want to downgrade to, find the More options button underneath. This should reveal the full set of plans.
5. Select the plan you want, then click Subscribe. Follow any prompts.

Once you’ve completed this process, you should get a confirmation email. At that point, you’re set. You’ll continue to have access to your current storage, benefits, and AI features until the end of the current billing cycle, at which point the downgrade will kick in. You may need to use that time for the tips in the next section.

What should I do before I downgrade?

Time to scrub

It’s absolutely vital to get your used storage under your new limit, if it isn’t already. While Google won’t delete any content that exceeds that limit, you also won’t be able to upload or receive anything new until you free up space or resume paying for a better plan. Here’s how the fallout breaks down:

• Google Photos: You can’t upload any more photos or videos. This includes both manual uploads and automatic backups from your camera roll.
• Gmail: You can’t send or receive any new messages, no matter who they’re from.
• Google Docs, Google Sheets, and similar Workspace apps: No new documents can be created. You may be able to edit existing documents, but don’t expect edits to take if they make a file larger rather than smaller.
• Google Drive: No new files can be uploaded, either manually or via automatic folder sync on your devices.

Needless to say, this can potentially cripple your Google account, and even your personal and professional lives if you depend on Gmail for communication. But the company is aware of this, and offers some tools to help.

How to clean up your Google storage

Here’s how to access Google’s clean-up tools:

1. Return to your Google Home dashboard on the web.
2. In the left-hand sidebar, click on Storage.
3. Near the top of the page, click on Clean up space.
4. Under Clean up suggested items, you’ll see recommendations related to your account, such as removing large Drive files or deleting Gmail messages with large attachments. Click one of the Review buttons linked to each category.
5. You’ll be taken to a page identifying files and messages, including their sizes, dates, and (as appropriate) image thumbnails. Use the checkboxes to select anything you’d like to scrub, then click Delete/Move to trash (the label depending on the app).
6. Return to the Clean up space menu as many times as you need to bring your storage under control.

You may need to be aggressive to get your storage under a smaller limit, but don’t be overzealous, either. Once you delete something using Google’s clean-up tools, it’s gone for good — the normal recovery tools aren’t available. You don’t want to accidentally delete a video of an important life event, or an email with critical info, such as your work login.

If you still need to clear up room but can’t bear to part with some things, there are a couple of options. The first is to download them (if you haven’t already) then sync them with an outside cloud service, such as Dropbox, OneDrive, or iCloud Drive. Those have even less storage available for free, however — Dropbox is capped at 2GB — so don’t expect to migrate everything over. Once you’ve moved critical content to an outside cloud service, it’s safe to scrub it from Google’s servers.

The second involves moving downloaded files to an external USB drive connected to your computer. This is risky, since personal drives can be lost or corrupted, but you can mitigate that threat by keeping copies on multiple devices. Preferably, one of these should be with you at all times, or at least easy to grab at a moment’s notice — you should be able to rush out the door with it if there’s a fire or other emergency.