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The pandemic is over for Google Meet: group calls from free accounts are limited again

When the pandemic began to have a unified response from most of the countries of the world and the first confinements arrived, not a few communication services began to release more and more functions for free to facilitate remote contacts. Google Meet was one of them, and the transfer from Hangouts accelerated in those days.

One of the things that Meet did was, apart from supporting up to 100 participants at the same time, allowing unlimited use of the service at no cost. If, until then, Meet was dedicated only to Workspace users, now any user could use the service at no cost and without a time limit. But it seems that it’s time to go back and now Google recovers the 60-minute limit for normal users in group calls.

If the call is in a group, you only have 60 minutes

Now, 15 months after Google opened Meet services and its main features to all users of its platform, it is time to go back and start, at least for now, for the time of calls. Google has already reported that for non-paying users, users of simple Gmail accounts, unlimited calls are over.

Like Zoom did a few months ago restricting free calls to 40 minutes, Google does the same by setting a 60 minute limit for calls from users not on Workspace paid plans. The platform itself will notify users during the call when 55 minutes have passed that the broadcast is close to stopping.

This will only happen, however, with group calls. Calls involving only a couple of users may remain unlimited and may be extended up to 24 hours if we wish. However, to make unlimited group calls we will have to go through the first level of Workspace payment, which costs 9.99 euros per month.

This is the first major limitation of Google on Meet since it opened the service due to the pandemic, so it would be logical to expect more in the near future. At the moment it only affects group calls, those used with groups of friends, family or the work environment. We’ll see if the cuts continue.

Via | 9to5Google

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