Google One subscription plan chaos is only snowballing with AI

Google One started off with a simple proposition: when you ran out of Drive storage, you rented more for a flat monthly fee. Then, over time, Google added some premium Google Photos features to One plans, giving you another incentive to upgrade. Then came the extra perks: VPN, advanced Workspace features, Google Store benefits, occasional freebies, and whatnot. Now, in the world of LLMs and Gemini, there are AI plans too; three of them, to be precise.

Having multiple choices sure gives you the power to choose, but it can also prove to be a mighty devil that does nothing but confuse the hell out of you. That’s the current state of Google One plans right now — and guess what? Google is making it worse still.

Despite being a fan favorite — and probably a must for Android users — Google One has been far from perfect even before AI was added to the mix. The biggest and most common complaint (that even I have) is the non-existent slab between 200GB and 2TB. When I hit the 200GB ceiling, I don’t suddenly require 10x the space; I could probably do with 500GB of storage (rings a bell?), which would be much more reasonable and even good enough for quite a few years. But nope, Google wants to be greedy.

And that’s just scratching the surface. Its family-sharing features need to be a lot more granular, like customized Drive storage allocation so your kids don’t hog all the space by dumping their media and game files, leaving none for your own photos.

Compared to iCloud+, Google One lacks tons of features like Hide My Email, which gets you an email alias for added privacy (Gmail has one, but it’s more of a desktop tool), or the thing I would kill for: a custom email address for personal use instead of getting pushed toward Workspace. Instead of adding these features, Google is often found dropping existing ones, like last year’s VPN support.

Google has a lot on its plate to fix with One, but it’s more focused on bringing AI into its plans — and it isn’t helping the cause one bit.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But what do you do when Google gives you AI when you specifically asked for something else?

Google has lately been reshuffling its One plans, but not in the direction of popular demand. It has a bunch of AI tiers — ones that give you access to advanced Gemini features, higher interaction limits, more monthly tokens, Gemini integration across Workspace, and more.

The most popularized is the Google AI Pro plan, which builds on the 2TB storage tier. Thanks to the AI features, though, it costs double at $20 a month. There’s also an Ultra tier, costing an eye-watering $250 a month, for 30TB of Drive storage with higher AI limits.

Since these plans are getting expensive (read: an attempt to grab more money out of your pocket), Google is piloting a third $5 AI plan with 200GB of storage and lower AI limits in a few markets outside the US and Europe.

But did you think Google would stop there? LOL.

Google Home Premium Plans

As the name implies, Google Home Premium offers advanced features for smart home devices, replacing the Nest Aware subscription. It costs $10 or $20 a month, depending on the variant you choose. But guess what: these advanced features are nothing but AI tools and cool Gemini tricks, so now you have two more subscriptions to juggle because three is apparently too little to practice with.

Here’s the kicker: Google Home Premium comes bundled with Google One AI Pro and Ultra plans. That sure is a good thing — you won’t have to worry about multiple subscriptions. However, Home Premium isn’t included in the Google AI Plus plan.

With five of these AI plans offering varying degrees of Gemini and other AI capabilities, you’ll now spend a lot of time scratching your head trying to make sense of which feature is available on which plan — and which device it’ll even work on.

Notably, the AI Plus plan isn’t available in the States, so you’re spared at least a part of that confusion, but you’re still arm-twisted in another way. Google is subtly nudging you up the price ladder, coercing you to spend more on the AI Pro or Ultra tiers by making them more enticing, not by actually delivering more value, but by making the standalone Home Premium plan look like a terrible deal.

At $10, Home Premium is still cheap, but it’s hyper-focused on home devices. And if you’re already paying $3 a month for the 200GB plan along with this $10 smart home plan, what’s another $7 for the AI Pro plan? Or if you’re already on the older 2TB plan that costs $10, getting Home Premium separately makes no sense — you’d be better off with the AI Pro bundle anyway.

It’s just Google’s way of making $20 a month the new standard subscription fee, whether you like it or not.

And if you’ve forgotten, you’d still be paying more to Google in monthly subscriptions for its other services.

‘One’ means something in Apple One. It consolidates all of Apple’s subscriptions into one: Music, Apple TV+, iCloud+, and even Arcade, for a single monthly fee. Google One, on the other hand, is just storage — while you still pay separately for YouTube Premium, YouTube Music, Fitbit Premium, Nest Aware, and let’s not forget, Play Pass for apps and games.

I can bet you’re already confused just reading about the tens of Google One plans — AI and non-AI, with all their asterisks and variations…I know, it’s maddening.

If Google wants me to stay in my senses when I go to renew my Google One annual plan next year, it had better get things in order. Now that it seems willing to bring more services under one roof, it needs to double down. Bring YouTube and YouTube Music Premium into the fold (even Play Pass, too), so I’m not juggling ten different subscriptions to one company alone.

And it should make that possible across storage options, rather than forcing me onto the 2TB tier when I’m never going to fill that much space, especially now that I rely primarily on my own NAS. I want the juicy AI and smart home features, but without the burden of renting storage I’ll never use.

An easy fix is to offer an AI add-on pack on top of existing, plain-old, storage-only Google One plans. That way, even basic 100GB users can get access to advanced AI features without overspending. A $10 AI upgrade — for ALL the AI features and reasonable limits — on top of the base $2 plan would simplify Google’s subscriptions and wouldn’t hurt the wallet that much, right?