Google's free unlimited Photos storage offer is an object lesson in anticompetitive behavior that helped drive startups like Everpix and Loom out of the market
A new policy perfectly illustrates a core issue across the industry — After five years of Google Photos offering unlimited …
Context & Ripple Effects
When Google launched Google Photos in 2015 with free unlimited storage — compressed images up to 16MP and video up to 1080p — it set the reference price for consumer photo backup at zero. The retreat began quietly: the Pixel 4 shipped in 2019 without free full-resolution backups, ending one of the phone line's original selling points.
This week Google made the exit explicit, announcing that unlimited storage ends June 1, 2021 under a 15GB cap, with uploads made before the cutoff grandfathered. OneZero's argument is that those five free years were not generosity but a moat: startups like Everpix and Loom, which could not subsidize storage indefinitely, were driven out while Google accumulated the user base.
First-order effects
- Independent photo-backup startups spent half a decade competing against a price of zero they could not match — Everpix and Loom exited the market, and survivors now face a category where Google alone sets the paid tier.
- Users who uploaded before the June 1, 2021 cutoff keep grandfathered storage, so the practical effect of the cap is to raise switching costs precisely as Google starts charging.
Second-order effects
- Third parties built on Google's free tier — HP and TimeHop joined the 2018 partner program and API — and the 15GB cap forces those partners to reprice their offerings or absorb storage costs they never budgeted for.
- With Google finally charging, rivals regain the ability to compete on price and features instead of losing by default to free, reshaping the paid cloud-storage market Google's subsidy had frozen.
Third-order effects
- The playbook — subsidize a category to zero until independents fold, then monetize the locked-in base — is exactly the conduct antitrust enforcers target, and Google's scale across adjacent services makes each such episode harder to dismiss as isolated.
- Grandfathering turns a pricing change into a lock-in mechanism: because existing photos don't count against the cap, leaving becomes costlier than paying, entrenching data gravity as the durable competitive asset.
The trend: Platform giants are cycling through below-cost free tiers to clear independent competitors out of consumer categories, then flipping to paid once the market consolidates — a pattern drawing growing regulatory scrutiny.