Video conferencing tool Meet becomes free for anyone with a Google account

Google’s business video conferencing tool Meet will be free for all users, provided they have a Google account and log in with it. The video calling service is no longer available exclusively as part of the G Suite aimed at organizations and businesses.

One potential limitation to the free use of Meet is that Google will basically limit virtual meetings to 60 minutes, though the company says it won’t maintain that limit until September 30. This means that the video service can be used by everyone in the next five months, even for meetings lasting longer than an hour.

Another limit, which has been in place for quite some time, is that sessions cannot have more than 100 participants. It was already possible to join a Meet video calling session as a non-paying user, but the session always had to be started by someone with a paid G Suite account.

The change is not immediately available. Google says that Meet will be made available to all users starting next week, and it will be done gradually. As a result, it could take several weeks before anyone without G Suite can use Meet.

During the presentation of its latest quarterly figures, Google said that the number of users of Meet is increasing by 3 million daily and that the total number of users is more than 100 million. Zoom, a major competitor of Meet, recently reported that it has more than 300 million users.