How to use Google Meet for free

From today onwards, you can use Google Meet for free. If you’re not familiar with it, Meet is a very popular video chatting app, but until now it’s only been available to paying customers. If you fancy trying it out, here’s how to use Meet for free.

Google Meet requirements

You need to have a Google account in order to start a Meet video meeting − if you’re not already a Gmail user, setting one up doesn’t take long − but you don’t need a Google account in order to join one.

You can start or join Meet calls either on the Meet website, or via the Meet apps for iOS and Android.

Is Google Meet free?

From May 4, Google is making Meet free to access. But it’ll be a gradual process. If you haven’t got the free option yet, you shouldn’t have to wait long. You can sign up here to get a notification when it does become available to you.

The paid Meet tiers will continue to exist, with a range of advanced − and often business-focused − features. Pricing starts at £4.60 per user per month, and goes all the way up to £20 per user per month.

Google Meet limits

The free version of Meet is pretty generous with both its time and participant limits.

Each meeting can hold up to 100 participants, and you’ll be able to see up to 16 of them on your screen at once.

Meetings will initially have a 24-hour time limit. However, this will change on October 1, when a 60-minute limit will come into force.

Houseparty doesn’t say what its limits are, but Meet compares favourably with Zoom, which also has a 100-person capacity but imposes a 40-minute limit on free video calls.

Related: Is Zoom safe?

Google Meet security

Google is trying to differentiate Meet from Zoom and Houseparty by talking up its security features and privacy credentials.

It’s attempted to make it difficult for trolls to hijack Meet calls by using meeting IDs that are 25 characters long, and by only allowing people to join a meeting up to 15 minutes in advance, thereby “reducing the window in which a brute force attack can even be attempted”.

Furthermore, anyone who tries to join a meeting without an invitation has to request entry.

Unlike Zoom and Houseparty, Meet calls are encrypted. However, they’re not end-to-end-encrypted, which means there’s no guarantee that their content will be protected from Google itself.

How to start a Google Meet meeting

To start a Meet meeting, fire up the Meet website or app, hit ‘Join or start a meeting’, create a name for the meeting, and hit ‘Continue’, then ‘Join now’.

You can add people to it either by selecting ‘Copy joining info’ and pasting and emailing the details out, or by hitting ‘Add people’.

Related: How to delete your Houseparty account

How to schedule a Google Meet call

You can schedule a Meet call in Google Calendar. Just create an event, hit ‘Add guests’ on the Guests tab, enter the correct email addresses, then hit ‘Save’ and ‘Send’.

How to kick people out of a Google Meet meeting

Hopefully this doesn’t happen, but if you ever need to kick somebody off your call, go to ‘People’ on the right-hand of the chat interface, hit the back arrow that appears next to the person you want to remove, then select ‘Remove’.

How to share screen on Google Meet

If you need to share anything on your screen during a Meet chat, hit the ‘Present now’ button in the bottom-right corner, and choose the right option from the list that appears, select your content and hit ‘Share’.

When you’re done, hit ‘Stop Presenting’.

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