Google is capping Meet’s group video calls to an hour for free accounts

From 2020-04-29: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;meet&#x2F;bringing-google-meet-to-more-people&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.google&#x2F;products&#x2F;meet&#x2F;bringing-google-meet-to-mo...</a><p>&gt; Until now, Meet has only been available as part of G Suite, our collaboration and productivity solution for businesses, organizations and schools. Going forward, Meet will be available to anyone for free on the web at meet.google.com and via mobile apps for iOS or Android.<p>&gt; Meetings are limited to 60 minutes for the free product, though we won’t enforce this time limit until after Sept. 30.<p>This is clearly stated as the intended policy at the launch of the free version. They temporarily lifted this restriction at launch due to COVID. They then delayed enforcing this restriction by ~9 months, because guessing the future of COVID was hard, especially in April 2020.

I’d pay extra to have my meetings capped to half an hour.

1 hour unlimited participants group video call is fair. Google is a business and Meet must justify it&#x27;s investment.<p>I am vary of BigCorpGoogleApple as much as the next HNer, but this seems fair to me.<p>Or perhaps my expectations were so low anticipating another product shut down ;)

They should have charged for this feature. People I know would have paid a bomb for a feature that put hard limits on call duration.

This is good. It&#x27;s a sign that Google is actually moving Meet towards a sustainable business model.

I use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meet.jit.si" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meet.jit.si</a><p>It&#x27;s open-source, you don&#x27;t need to sign-in, and in my experience it survives bad connections better than Google Meet.

Yeah they are no longer allowing unlimited time because covid seems to be coming to a close (or at least the USA is treating it like it is). It wasnt free before. I don&#x27;t love the move but it&#x27;s not surprising at all.

If I can suggest a change to the title for clarity (and still remaining in the character limit): &quot;Google is capping free Meet&#x27;s formerly unlimited group calls to an hour&quot;. Not perfect but more clear.

Zoom caps to 40 minutes and has an easy &quot;upgrade now or this meeting will end&quot; button. Very effective conversion tool.

Ugh, wish it were 70-75 minutes to account for meetings that run over...<p>(Please no hate, I&#x27;m just being practical - high value conversation can happen in the final minutes and if participants aren&#x27;t running off to another meeting, then it&#x27;s best to just give them a few extra minutes)

Is this maybe to lend a bump to their new &#x27;Individual&#x27; Google Workspace Plan? [1]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27831735" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=27831735</a>

Can’t there be just another meeting back to back ? After ending the first ?

Try our free demo (uncapped for the near future) with collaborative plugins at demo.dyte.io (YC W21)

Google Meets is not as good as Zoom for our major use case: multiple couples of family or friends, each with a laptop.<p>If you try this with Google, at least when we used it, it didn&#x27;t have multi-display: You could only see the &quot;main group&quot; talking, which might be someone laughing or ruffling a bag of crisps. Furthermore, the sound quality was straight up worse than Zoom, borderline inaudible with the same equipment Zoom gets.

I&#x27;m surprised anyone would ever want to use Google Meet, but now Google wants you to pay for it. Oh the irony.

<i>Unlimited time</i> version is available if adsense ads, and voice &amp; video recording with telemetry is permitted for all users. *&#x2F;S*

just a reminder jitsi still has an unlimited free tier

Vesy good

And noone was surprised

So, about a year and a half until Meet is canned?

This is entirely due to the record meeting feature has been decimating their google drive infrastructure.

I don&#x27;t know a single person (personal or business) that uses Google Meet. I&#x27;m in the UK though - it it popular in the US or elsewhere?

How many meetings go on more than an hour?<p>Does the time limit really save Google much bandwidth&#x2F;cpu&#x2F;money?<p>Is this just to prevent people who use it as a baby monitor? Or perhaps the limit is just to persuade people to start paying for Google Apps for your Worksuite?

The issue is nobody really read terms &amp; conditions expecting that Meet will go the way all Google communication apps went.<p>Now that it proved useful for some people, people are expecting that it will stay the way it made it useful.<p>But it will not, limited free calls means less usage, and Google will eventually shut it down.<p>It&#x27;s funny that a company with unlimited resources can&#x27;t be successful in creating something that is basically a commodity and a solved problem.