Save money on Google Drive storage on an iPad

A couple of weeks ago I was looking into purchasing more storage for my Google Drive account but the only option was to pay by the month if I wanted to do so. First, I recently purchased a Nexus 4 so that is the main reason I wanted to up my Drive storage. Looking at the "Buy Storage for Drive" you will notice as I mentioned above your only option is to purchase monthly, it is not expensive as it starts out at $2.49 a month which is really cheap if you compare that to the pricing of say Dropbox per month cost. I decided to ask on Google+ if there was a way to pay for a year of Drive storage. Sadly the answer was no. After investigating further I discovered that while $2.49 is cheap, it is also much more expensive than the old pricing of Drive.

Enter Steve Ruge on Google+, he kindly pointed out that in the Google Drive app on the iPad you could still purchase more Drive storage and pay for it for the year via an In-App purchase. Not only could you pay for the year but it will end up saving you $4.98 which is 2 months free if you used the $2.49 a month for 1 year of 25GB storage that is found on the Drive page to purchase more storage.



The odd thing is you cannot do this on an android device. I tried to purchase more via the Drive app on my android phone and it kicks me out the browser and opens the same Drive upgrade page as linked above. Clearly this is a move to get iOS users using Drive on their devices, saving $5 or getting 2 months free is a good start in my opinion. I only wished I could purchase more than 25GB though. It would have been nice to see the 100GB for $50 available as an In-App purchase. I guess Google doesn't like having to give Apple that 30% cut. Another thing to remember is you will not have to add a credit card to Google Wallet by purchasing in the iPad. This is an IAP and the money comes from your Apple account so if you want to try Drive but don't want to give Google your credit card info then there is that!

To access the upgrade in Drive:

1. Tap the settings gear on the lower left of Drive (next to your email address)


2. Tap Storage


3. Upgrade Your Storage

If you found this helpful then let me know on Twitter or send me a shout out on Google+