# Google Drive 66 Hacker News commenters recommended Google Drive and 130 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5 years (3 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended for reliable storage, easy sync and access, and tight integration with Google Docs and other tools. Critics mostly object to aggressive upsell and AI prompts in the interface. ## Why people recommend it - Cheap storage plans (3 comments): "I ended up switching to Google Drive's $2/month plan and never looked back at Dropbox" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48287027)) "Google drive pricing is cheaper than S3/Google cloud storage for storage." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47676651)) "it comes with a couple terabytes of Drive storage for the family" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47117279)) - Works with third-party apps (3 comments): "Google Drive has a beautiful API that is used by everything from the Google Drive desktop client to rclone" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47445989)) "it even has Dropbox or Google Drive integrations that work out of the box" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822967)) "it works flawlessly with google drive and my nextcloud instance" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47498914)) - Dependable version history and recovery (3 comments): "This has never happened to me in more than 5 years of paying for Google Drive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46132013)) "all of these systems have version history and document recovery built in" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46598376)) "was only able to rescue it using the Google Drive backup" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329622)) - Easy access to documents anywhere (2 comments): "It gives me the ease of having access to a giant amount of files stored in my gdrive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47675034)) "Along comes Google Drive and Docs and now you can edit your document everywhere" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47963501)) ## What people warn about - Weak permissions and sharing controls (4 comments): "It tells me I should have a real hatred of any files being in the root directory, and completely disregard sharing and permissions boundaries." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48379749)) "Google Drive doesn't have super granular permission structure to be able to set up a partitioned directory for the app alone" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46441696)) "No, I'm not going to give access to my privately stored file share in order to view a prompt someone has shared." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45969254)) - Pushy AI summaries and prompts (3 comments): "I turned off the "smart" features and the only thing that changed is that the nag box still pops up and shifts the UI around" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928680)) "They have really amped up the ferocity of the language they're using to try and extract money from you for Drive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47487828)) "every time I open a PDF in Google Drive, it forces an AI summary of the doc with no way for me to switch it off" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988532)) - Limited command line and API access (2 comments): "they don't really want power users who use their whole quota, so they don't make things like command line / API access easy." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329391)) "less optimal for my needs, because their js oauth implementation is very conservative about token length" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129798)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Apple iCloud](https://hackerapproved.com/p/icloud.md): 144 recommend - [Dropbox](https://hackerapproved.com/p/dropbox.md): 140 recommend - [OneDrive](https://hackerapproved.com/p/onedrive.md): 86 recommend - [rsync.net](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rsync-net.md): 34 recommend - [Hetzner Storage Box](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hetzner-storage-box.md): 27 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://workspace.google.com/products/drive/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Google Drive", https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-drive/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).