Google has set 60 free minutes when using Google Meet for meetings, starting on September 30. Google said in April that it will allow unlimited meetings in its video chat platform, Google Meet, for all users until September 30. The company appears to be committed to this schedule, and now after September 30, the free versions of Meet will be limited to meetings that do not exceed 60 minutes in duration.
“We don’t have anything to communicate regarding changes to the promotion and expiration of advanced features,” a Google spokesperson told The Verge in an email on Friday. “If this changes, we will be sure to let you know.”
Under the extension, anyone with a Google account can create free meetings with up to 100 people, and with no time limit.
Also going away on September 30 is access to advanced features for G Suite and G Suite for Education customers, including allowing meetings of up to 250 participants, live streaming to up to 100,000 people in a single domain, and the ability to save meeting recordings to Google Drive.
These features are typically only available to customers in G Suite’s “Enterprise” tier, which costs $25 per user per month.
Google Meet and other video conferencing platforms have been chasing Zoom’s meteoric rise during the coronavirus pandemic, surpassing 100 million daily participants in April.
Of course what this deadline means for most users who don’t want to upgrade to Meet’s paid plan is that they’ll have to limit their group calls to 60 minutes or less.
