Upgrade to a 2TB Google One storage subscription and get a ‘free’ Nest Hub

Google is running its Nest Hub promotion again, and if you missed out last time on grabbing a smart display at “no cost”, then now is your chance to atone for your sins. Just kidding, smart displays aren’t for everyone, and I get that, but ever since my son broke mine on accident, I’ve been without, trying to no avail to make my Lenovo Chromebook duet take its place for smart home controls and other media. Unfortunately, the fact that I need to lock it defeats the purpose, so I have a new Hub on the way!

Today, I noticed that the company is promoting its Google One 2TB subscription upgrade hand-in-hand with the Nest Hub smart display as a sort of “gift” for your decision to upgrade. I said before that it came at “no cost”, but that’s in quotation marks for a reason. The stipulation is that you’re already spending $99 USD today to become a One member with a crap ton of storage, but really that device is $99 USD itself off the shelf.

If you look at it this way, you’re technically paying for the hardware out of pocket and getting free storage for a year. Clever psychology, I know. If you’re upgrading from a 200GB storage tier as I did, you’re already paying $36 USD per year, so the difference between that and the Hub means you’re paying about $63 USD for it instead of the full $99. I know this is a funny way of looking at it, but I tend to think in those terms, not the marketing trickery that companies apply to your pockets.

I don’t even know what I’ll do with 2TB of storage in the cloud as I still haven’t filled what I’ve had for years, but there is no cancelation fee or contract with Google One, so you could upgrade to get the device, enjoy larger storage limits for the rest of the year, and then downgrade so that you’re not unnecessarily paying a hundred bucks a year instead of a third of that.

No doubt some people will forget to downgrade (put it on the calendar!), but Google is banking on people doing so or simply enjoying the extra space and realizing that they actually do need it after all. Some folks simply haven’t even tried Google One, so it’s a nice little perk to entice those who have been using only free Google Accounts with no strings attached until now.

You can check out the offer if you’d like and upgrade if you feel compelled. Should you do so, you will receive an email regarding your “free” Nest Hub a bit later so that you can go ahead and claim it through the Google Store via a promotional code which will take off 100% of the cost since the company covers the shipping cost too.