Web search and Internet services company Google Inc. on Friday began selling expanded online storage, aimed at users with large picture, music or video file collections.
The annual prices established were $20 for 6 gigabytes of online storage, $75 for 25 GB, $250 for 100 GB and $500 for 250 GB.
Google said the storage can be used across several Google products, including photo site Picasa and the e-mail service Gmail. The storage will soon also work with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which are the company's word processing and spreadsheet applications.
Gmail users currently get nearly 3 GB of free storage while Picasa users get 1 GB. The expanded storage would kick in when a user runs out of free storage in a particular service.
Yahoo and AOL already offer unlimited free storage for their e-mail services.
Mountain View-based Google has been adding about 145 megabytes of free storage to each e-mail account annually — a pace that would raise storage limits to more than 3.25 GB in three years. Instead of matching Yahoo and AOL, Google decided instead to charge for additional storage to users with extraordinary needs.