No more free lunch for WhatsApp Android users as backups will be deducted from storage limit

Google and WhatsApp have announced that WhatsApp backups will soon start impacting your free cloud storage quota. This means you cannot continue to be as mindless as you have been about backups because if you run out of storage, the backups will stop. To continue storing your chats and media on the cloud, you'll have to delete some stuff from your Google Drive. You may also consider deleting items from WhatsApp so they take up as little space as possible.

To avoid sounding like a spoil-sport, Google points out that this is how backups have always been handled on other platforms (Apple's iOS) which offer three times less free storage space (5GB) than Google. Keep in mind that 15GB of free storage is shared across Google Drive, Google Photos, and Gmail.

WhatsApp Beta users will be the first to experience this change next month, whereas others will be hit by the change from early next year.

Google has also dutifully pointed out that you can always sign up for Google One, the company's cloud storage subscription service which starts at $1.99 per month for 100GB. Google will also offer one-time promotions to ease the transition.

If you don't want to store chats on Google Drive, you can use the WhatsApp Chat Transfer feature instead to move chats and media between Android devices.

WhatsApp will inform users 30 days before the change is implemented with a banner in WhatsApp Settings > Chats > Chat backup.