Google Meet is one of those services that exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic. The global confinements caused these types of services to become extremely popular for keeping in touch with friends and family, to the point that Google decided to extend the free Meet options temporarily.
In April 2020 Google allowed video calls of up to 100 participants and unlimited time until September. September came and Google extended the deadline to March 2021. March came and Google again extended the period until June 2021. Now July has arrived and Google Meet is limited again for free users.
No more unlimited group video calls in Google Meet
This is reflected in the Google Meet support website and has been discovered in 9to5Google. The support website specifies that free users of Google Meet, that is, all those who have a Google account and not Google Workspace Individual, again have a limit of minutes.
Specifically, Google states that free Google Meet users can make individual (one-to-one) video calls of up to 24 hours, but that video calls with three or more participants may only last up to 60 minutes.
That’s not too low a limit, but it can be a bit of a hindrance for some video calls. At 55 minutes, all participants in the video call will receive a notification that the call is nearing its end. To extend the video call, the host will be able to upgrade their Google account.
This is a somewhat higher limit than Zoom, which limits group video calls to 40 minutes. In any case, nothing prevents us from ending the video call and restarting another one, which would give us another 60 minutes.
