Due to the rise of the COVID-19 pandemic since last year, many businesses and enterprises opted for an online mode of working. Be it meetings or other important video calls, various video calling platforms have played a significant role in keeping the businesses alive, and Google Meet is one of them. To help small businesses, schools, and individuals, Google made Meet free for personal Gmail accounts and has been extending the dates since then. Now, the company has extended the availability of free unlimited (up to 24 hours) calls for personal Google accounts to June 2021.
In the beginning, last year, Google Meet announced to offer unlimited calls for free until September 30, 2020, but it was extended later to March 31, 2021, ie. today. Today, the tech giant has once again announced the extension of Google Meet free unlimited video calls until June. This is usually a paid feature and free users can only do video calls for up to 60 minutes. But considering the COVID-19 pandemic still on, Google has decided to extend the feature for free for three more months.
Google Meet Free Unlimited Video Calls Extended
The premium Meet features include 250-person meetings, internal live streaming, and saving call recordings to Drive and are restricted to higher (paid) tiers. In March 2020, Google said that it would offer the premium Meet (then called Hangouts) features for free to all G Suite customers. Later, the company made it free for regular users as well and integrated it with Gmail. The giant stopped enforcing the 60-minute time limit on calls and said to do so until September 30. It then extended the deadline to March 31, 2021.
Since today was supposed to be the last day, but starting tomorrow, the feature will continue to be available for free Gmail users until June 30, 2021. So, users that are heavily using Google Meet for long video calls should face no disruption. This is something that probably most users wanted in these times of the pandemic. We don’t know if the feature would stay after June 3, only the time will tell whether Google extends it again or not.
