Googleカレンダーの共有: what the free tier covers

Looking for the price of Google Calendar sharing produces a pricing page with no line for sharing on it. The feature has no price tag, which is the correct answer and a useless one, because the practical question underneath is different: something about a shared calendar is not working, and it is worth knowing whether money has anything to do with the fix.

Usually it does not. The place where cost actually enters is not a feature list but a question about the recipient. Sharing with three colleagues who each decide for themselves, sharing with a company that needs a rule nobody can break, sharing with a client who has no Google account, or publishing to anyone at all: those four cases sit on different sides of the billing line. Sorting a situation into one of them takes a minute and saves a subscription that would have changed nothing.

Sharing itself has no price tag

A free Google account can create additional calendars, share any of them with named people or groups, and assign any of the five access levels Google documents. Those levels are: see only free/busy with details hidden, see event details, make changes with private events shown as free/busy, make changes and see event details, and make changes and manage sharing.

None of the five is gated behind a subscription. A paid plan does not add a sixth level and does not alter what any of the five mean. There is no published cap, on a free account, on how many calendars can be shared or how many people can receive them.

That matters because it rules out an entire class of explanation. When a shared calendar does not appear for the person on the other end, the cause is the access level chosen, or an invitation that was never accepted. Google is explicit about the second one: the recipient gets an email, and "to add your calendar, they need to click the link in the email." A calendar that was shared but never accepted stays invisible regardless of what edition either side is paying for.

Three different operations share one word

Part of what makes the cost question confusing is that three unrelated mechanisms all get called sharing. Separating them shows where the money is not.

The first is handing over a calendar. The recipient sees everything in it, continuously. Events added next month appear without any further action, and access continues until it is revoked.

The second is inviting guests to a single event. The guest sees that one event and nothing else. Per-event controls decide whether a guest can modify the event, invite others, or see the guest list, and those controls are set event by event rather than once.

The third is publishing a link and letting someone subscribe to it. The result lands in the subscriber's application as a read-only feed. Nothing can be written back to it, and the person on the far end is not a participant in the calendar in any meaningful sense.

All three are free. More usefully, all three fail differently. A report that a shared calendar "is not showing up" means something different in each case, and identifying which of the three is actually in play resolves a large share of these situations without a pricing page being opened at all.

When the recipient is inside one organization

A team of free accounts can share calendars with each other all day. What a paid edition buys is not the sharing, it is an administrator, and an administrator can do things no individual account holder can do at any price.

The clearest of these is a default for internal sharing. An administrator picks one of three settings for the organization: calendars are not shared unless users share their own, only free/busy information with event details hidden, or share all information. Defaults reach new accounts, which means a person who joins next month and configures nothing still lands in a known state. On a pile of free accounts the equivalent is written instructions and someone checking afterwards.

The other is resource calendars. Meeting rooms, equipment and other bookable objects exist as calendars an administrator creates, and their availability appears during scheduling. For anyone whose real problem is consecutive meetings in different rooms, that is a scheduling capability rather than a permission one, and it does not exist on the free side.

When the recipient is outside the organization

On a free account, sharing outward is entirely the account holder's decision. Any address can be given any of the five levels, including the level that allows editing. Nothing stops it and nothing costs anything.

The moment a limit is wanted, the paid layer becomes the only mechanism. An administrator selects one of four ceilings for external sharing: only free/busy information with event details hidden, share all information but outsiders cannot change calendars, share all information and outsiders can change calendars, or share all information and allow managing of calendars. The ceiling binds every individual underneath it.

After you limit external sharing for your organization, users can't exceed these limits when sharing individual events. Source: support.google.com

This is the sentence that decides the billing question for most companies. A statement like "meeting titles never leave this company" is either a structural fact or a thing everyone is asked to remember. Making it structural requires a paid edition. Leaving it to individual judgement does not cost money, and for a small group it is often the honest choice.

When the recipient has no Google account

Cost does not increase here either. The mechanism is the secret address in iCal format, found under settings for the calendar in question, in the section for integrating the calendar. Handing that link over lets the recipient subscribe from a calendar application that reads iCal.

Google attaches a plain warning to that link, and it is worth taking at face value: "Only you should know the Secret Address for your calendar. Do not share this address with other people." Anyone holding the address can read the calendar, with no way to tell who is holding it. If it does get out, the settings page has a Reset control that issues a new address and invalidates the old one.

For genuinely public information there is a separate option to make a calendar public, which Google notes can make it findable "on the internet or in search results". That also costs nothing. What it costs instead is control: pulling something back after it has been indexed is a different kind of work from revoking one person's access.

The published prices for Japan

The figures below are the per-user monthly prices published for Japan, in yen, before tax.

Edition	Per user, per month	Storage per user
Business Starter	800 yen	30 GB
Business Standard	1,600 yen	2 TB
Business Plus	2,500 yen	5 TB
Enterprise	Contact sales	5 TB

All three Business editions carry a ceiling of 300 users. Past that the Enterprise edition applies and the figure is quoted individually.

A promotional rate covering the first three months is published for new customers, limited to the first 20 users within a twelve month window. For planning purposes the standard figure is the one to model, since the promotional period ends well before the question of renewal arrives.

Put concretely, a team of five on Business Standard pays 8,000 yen a month, or 96,000 yen a year. The honest description of that spend is not that it buys calendar sharing. It buys one place to set the ceiling, plus mail, storage and the rest of the suite. Teams that evaluate it as a calendar purchase tend to conclude it is expensive, because measured that way it is.

What paying does not change

Before comparing editions it helps to list the things that stay exactly as they are after the upgrade.

• A calendar the recipient never accepted stays invisible, on any edition.
• A recipient given free/busy access never sees event titles, on any edition.
• A calendar subscribed by iCal address stays read only, and the subscriber cannot write to it.
• The clutter of five calendars competing for one week view is unaffected by billing.

There is a further one that rarely gets stated. Paying does not change the behaviour of the person on the other end. A colleague who was granted edit access and then moves an event is exercising exactly the permission that was granted, and the fix is the access level rather than the plan. Groups behave the same way: a calendar shared with a mailing list follows the membership of that list, so someone who joins the list later gains the access without anyone deciding to grant it. That is a useful property when it is intended and a surprising one when it is not, and it is identical on free and paid accounts.

The last one is the one that quietly consumes the most time. Work, personal, a shared team calendar, a client calendar subscribed by URL, plus whatever a project left behind: once that many layers sit on one grid, the problem has stopped being about permissions. It has become a question of which calendars are visible at which moment, and no edition of anything answers that.

Where the cost actually lands on a Mac

If sharing is free, then whatever is spent gets spent on the tool used to read it. Calendar applications for the Mac run from free to one-time purchases to annual subscriptions, and the spread is wide enough that picking by price alone is guesswork.

The useful filter is which of three problems is the live one. If several shared calendars need to sit on one screen with fast control over what is visible, the thing to compare is the display model, which is what the Compared with other calendars page is organised around. If the time loss is in the act of creating events, because the same few details get typed several times a day, then input speed is the axis, and Entering events describes how that is handled without a form.

If the failure is arriving late because meetings sit adjacent to each other with no room for the trip between them, no amount of permission tuning touches it. That requires travel time to be part of the event rather than something remembered separately, and Travel time covers how that is modelled. Deciding what to spend is far easier once it is clear which of the three is actually happening, and the FAQ answers most of what comes up before that decision.

What to change first

Sort the situation by recipient before looking at any price. If the people receiving the calendar can be trusted to choose their own sharing level, Google Calendar itself costs nothing and the budget question is closed.

If a limit has to hold without anyone remembering it, that is what the paid edition provides and the starting figure is 800 yen per user per month. Either way the remaining friction is on the screen where all those calendars land, which is a tooling decision rather than a billing one: see Caltimate for how that side is put together.