Google makes its free Web-based Gmail service pricey

Google has given e-mailers a reason to rejoice by offering them an increased storage space. However, the users will have to pay for this additional storage.

Mountain View-based Google on Friday announced a major storage upgrade for its worldwide active Gmail and Picasa users by increasing the storage limit from standard 1GB free storage for Picasa and 2.8GB for Gmail to up to 250GB of storage, which Google will offer for a fee.

Once a user reaches the standard limit of free storage, he/she would become eligible to buy additional storage. The additional storage space is available at a price of $20 per year for 2.8GB more space, while for the larger plans ranging up to 250GB space Google will charge $500 annually.

Users can also buy even 25 GB of more space for $75 a year and 100 GB for $250 per year.

Writing on Google’s official blog Ryan Aquino, software QA Engineer Lead, Picasa Web Albums, stated that the company’s recent move is mainly intended to meet its users’ demand for additional storage.

“In the case of online storage, whether it’s a picture, a video or an email, you should just, well, be able to store it without having to worry about whether you’ve got enough space in each particular product,” he wrote.

Google’s storage upgrade to its Web-based e-mail service Gmail and Picasa, a photo editing and organizing service, comes months after its arch rival Microsoft announced a global storage upgrade for its active MSN Hotmail user accounts by increasing the storage limit from 250 MB to 1 GB.

Google introduced its Gmail service with 1 GB storage capacity in April 2004 and upgraded it to 2GB in 2005.

The Internet search giant is also planning to soon provide extra storage space to its other services, including Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets, a free web-based word processing and spreadsheet program that create and edit documents and enables the people update files from their own machines.

Currently Google's Web-based software, dubbed Google Apps Premier Edition, is available for a $50 annual fee per user. Besides the Web-based programs like Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk instant messaging, and the Google customizable Start Page feature, Google’s PE software bundle recently has included Google Docs & Spreadsheets.