Lately, Google has been... let's just say, a little close-fisted when it comes to handing out free storage. The company stopped offering unlimited backups for Photos in an attempt to get people to pay up for Google One plans if their requirements exceeded the 15GB offered for free with every account. Now, it might go after yet another benefit. Drive currently doesn't count WhatsApp backups against your storage quota, but if freshly surfaced info is anything to go by, Google might be soon adding limits to how much of your stuff you can store in the cloud for free.

Some months ago, an in-development option had surfaced that, once live, would allow users to manage their backup size to decide what parts of their WhatsApp chat history they want to be uploaded to the cloud. Back then, it was speculated that this was in preparation for a removal, or at least limitation, of Drive's free storage for WhatsApp backups. It seems that hunch was right. WABetaInfo found some curious strings while dissecting WhatsApp's latest beta, and they're not good news for those of you with big, thicc backups.

Some of these strings reveal how the app will communicate the news ("Google Drive backup changing") and detail notifications that let you know when you're about to fill your free storage ("Google Drive almost full") and when you've reached your limit ("Google Drive limit reached"). As per previous details, this free tier might be capped at 2GB — these strings aren't giving us info on whether that's right or wrong, so don't quote us on that — after which you'll still be able to upload your chats to Google Drive, but it will begin counting against your storage quota.

2GB is fine if you don't throw in too much media, but if you start counting photos and videos downloaded over the months/years, it starts adding up. Apparently, mine is 17GB? So yep. Better start saving up for that Google One plan, or store your backups locally.

Thanks: Armando