It also doesn't help that Google's free tier (15GB) is laughably small in 2026.
HDD capacity and Google's profits grew many-fold since that was last increased (in 2012-ish?).
HDD capacity and Google's profits grew many-fold since that was last increased (in 2012-ish?).
Only Mega offers more for free (20GB).
Microsoft offers 5GB.
Ente.io offers 10GB.
Proton.io offers 2GB (if you jump through some time-limited hoops, most of which defeats the purpose of using a privacy cloud, you get a whooping 5GB free instead)
Filen.io offers 10GB, but you can get 30GB if you do a similar dance to proton and spam your referral code everywhere.
So while I would say 15GB is pretty typical, I would not say it's competitive. I would say the competition died in 2013.
Disclosure: I work at Google, but not on anything related to this.
The competition ended over a decade ago, and 15GB stayed 15GB even though the price of providing it dropped 5x.
Even though they're near the top, none of those companies are "competitive" in my book.
People designed "gmail-as-storage" apps to take advantage of this.
20 years later and we get a pathetic 15GB for mail, photos and everything else combined.
The limit used to cost a whole dollar of hard drive space (plus redundancy), sometimes more than that. If they kept that up with adjustment for inflation then 100GB would be the free tier today, not a $20/year tier.