Google service accounts get 15GB of Drive quota that cant be raised

TL;DR

The accepted answer: service accounts get a fixed 15GB quota with no way to buy more.

Steps

1. When you build Drive uploads on a service account, plan around the hard 15GB quota; it cant be increased. For larger volumes, upload into a shared drive owned by the organization or impersonate a licensed user via domain-wide delegation. Monitor quota usage so the failure doesnt arrive as a surprise in production.

When to use

You are seeing this: When you build Drive uploads on a service account, plan around the hard 15GB quota; it cant be increased. Use this skill when you run into "Google service accounts get 15GB of Drive quota that cant be raised".

When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.

Source: Stack Overflow #40535355 (accepted answer, 12 votes): uploading via the Drive API with a service account eventually fails with 'storage quota exceeded'. The accepted answer: service accounts get a fixed 15GB quota with no way to buy more. The workaround is uploading into a shared drive or using domain-wide delegation to act as a real user.

Verified resolution: When you build Drive uploads on a service account, plan around the hard 15GB quota; it cant be increased. For larger volumes, upload into a shared drive owned by the organization or impersonate a licensed user via domain-wide delegation. Monitor quota usage so the failure doesnt arrive as a surprise in production.

Source URL: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40535355/how-to-fix-the-storage-exceeded-issue-for-google-drive-when-uploading-using-serv