> Google won't let me give them money to upgrade my storage
While not explicitly documented anywhere, they automatically increase your storage limits once you approach a certain margin of remaining free space. That happens around Tuesday-Wednesday, they just add extra 5Gb to your limit.
Huh. Which edition are you on, the no-cost business starter they migrated some users to or the GSuit legacy free? How long did your account stay at 97% space? From my experience, it takes a week to trigger.
I'm on the legacy free edition, and the auto increase worked for me as of November last year. I'm sitting on 41G used out of 51G limit, with photos taking up 29G. I have a second user in my workspace who also benefits from this feature.
Since the whole thing is not documented anywhere, it's hard to rely on or exploit. From my experience, it works.
Check out search results on "gsuite legacy storage increase 5gb", multiple users reported on their experience with it. It looks like extra space is granted if you're close to the limit, but not over it, for ~1 week.
There are also single reports on Google taking back the extra storage - back to 15(17)Gb - for people with extreme (ab)use of the feature, who stacked hundreds of gigabytes through 5Gb steps. Couldn't verify any of them.
I'm using 50-license GSuite since 2009, if that matters.
Any idea what sort of margin ballpark we're looking at? With a combination of email and Google Photos I got up to around 97% used a year ago and just had to move older photos elsewhere - would be good to test again if an increase will be given.