Cloud storage for a family: what the sharing rules actually say

Storage is the category where sharing is most often permitted, because a storage plan holds separate accounts rather than one stream somebody else might be watching. It is also the category where the rules are written in two documents instead of one, which is where people get caught out.

Google One: the terms, and then the group

The Google One terms deal with sharing in one clause: your subscription “may allow you to share certain benefits with your family group”, and “Only Google One plan managers may add family members to, and enable or disable Family Sharing on, a Google One subscription.” That is the whole of it. No address, no relationship test.

The constraints live in the other document — what a Google family group is. Google says you “create a family group with up to six members”, that the manager may “invite up to five other people to join”, that invitees need a Google Account and that the manager must be 18 or older.

The clause worth reading twice: “People can only join one family group at a time and they can only switch to another family group once every 12 months.” Joining somebody's group for storage locks you out of joining another for a year.

That last rule is the real cost of a storage seat, and it is not money. If your own household might want to put you on a family plan this year, think before joining a stranger's group for 2 TB.

Apple, Microsoft and Dropbox: read before you split

The other three storage plans in beemate's catalogue — iCloud+, Microsoft 365 Family and Dropbox Family — each have their own definition of who may be in the group, and this article does not quote them, because they were not read closely enough on the day it was written to be quoted accurately. A paraphrase of somebody's terms is not a source.

What to do instead takes two minutes: open the provider's own page — Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox — search it for “household” and for “address”, and see whether the plan is described as a family group or as a household. The method is in which subscriptions can you share.

The thing that makes storage different

Nobody shares files. Google's own description is blunt about it — a family group shares the storage “without sharing any of your personal files”. Each member gets their own space inside the plan's quota, which is why a storage plan can be split between people who would never share a streaming account.

It is also why no password changes hands. A storage seat is an invitation, and everything in sharing a login safely becomes irrelevant, which is the best kind of safety advice.

What is open today

The storage and productivity category has whatever seats are open right now, each listing carrying the provider's own terms link and what beemate's catalogue currently records about it — which today, for every service, is that the review is not finished.