Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals (pooled tenant)
- Free allowance
- 100 TB of pooled cloud storage per institution, at 'No cost'.
- Verdict
- ★ qualifiesusable as stated; the read path was probed
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- institutionno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- per-object-cap5 TB per single upload
- Evidence
- reported5 sources; a third party said so
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05
| Free tier | 100 TB of pooled cloud storage per institution, at 'No cost'. Pooled across Drive + Gmail + Photos and all shared drives. Confirmed twice on Google's own pages: 'Schools and universities with Google Workspace for Education subscriptions have a baseline of 100 TB of pooled storage shared across all users' and 'Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals / Standard — 100 TB total for all End Users'. unit TB; metered on stored-bytes |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
per-object-cap 5 TB per single upload, and 750 GB per user per 24 h (upload+copy) — this is the real throttle, and it is refreshing not cumulative. request-rate: standard Drive API quota (per-project, raiseable). retention: none while the tenant is active; data survives account suspension but suspended users still consume the pool. Item cap 500 million items per user. Over-quota: at +25% or 14 days, uploads and Docs creation stop but download keeps working. |
| Binding | per-object-cap the per-object cap sets the shard size and therefore the object count; it bounds the total more tightly than any headline quota |
| Identity | institution not published |
| Egress | Not metered for Drive reads. Google's own storage page says over-quota tenants 'can still sign in to ... view and download their files' — i.e. reads are never blocked by quota. Direct-download URLs are served from Google's edge; put behind Cloudflare if you want a cache. |
| Per-object cap | 5 TB per single upload (5000000000000 bytes) |
| Retention | Over-quota: at +25% or 14 days, uploads and Docs creation stop but download keeps working. (14 days) |
| Interface | rest, rclone rest |
| Tooling | rclone backend 'drive' (Tier 1, server-side copy, shared-drive support); Google Drive API v3; GAM (github.com/GAM-team/GAM) for admin-side bulk operations; gclone for service-account fan-out. |
| Composes with | One qualifying institution = one tenant = 100 TB. Inside a tenant the multiplier is shared drives (unlimited count) and user count: up to 2,500 licenses per new domain, all drawing on the same 100 TB pool. Adding Teaching & Learning add-on licences adds 100 GB each 'with no cap' (paid). |
| Reliability | Stable for a decade, but Google already abolished the predecessor's unlimited tier (2021 archive: 'Existing customers ... will continue to have unlimited storage until early 2022'). Quota is now hard-capped and admin-auditable, so a tenant can be spotted by whoever administers it. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 5
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-21 | knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/getting-started/edition | 'baseline of 100 TB of pooled storage shared across all users' |
| 2026-10-21 | support.google.com/a/answer/172541 | table: 'Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals / Standard | 100 TB total for all End Users'; 'Each user can upload and copy 750 GB to Drive within 24 hours ... up to 5 TB in size' |
| 2026-10-21 | knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/getting-started/edition | K-12 and degree-granting institutions only; 'must establish a separate domain for the school to qualify' |
| 2026-10-21 | source not published | probe: GET knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/getting-started/editions/overview-of-google-workspace-for-education-storage -> 200 (quota quoted live, 2026-10-21) |
| 2026-10-21 | source not published | probe: GET www.googleapis.com/drive/v3/about?fields=storageQuota -> 401 (anonymous; confirms API is the read path, auth required) |
Unknown values 3
$.identity_cost.detailboilerplate$.per_object_cap.notesthe field may be stated in a source that was not read$.retention.notesthe field may be stated in a source that was not read