Up until now, if you were subscribed to Office 365 – I think it’s called Microsoft 365 now – and you wanted the various “AI” Copilot features, you needed to pay $20 extra. Well, that’s changing, as Microsoft is now adding these features to Microsoft 365 by default, while raising the prices for every subscriber by $3 per month. It seems not enough people were interested in paying $20 per month extra for “AI” features in Office, so Microsoft has to force everyone to pay up. It’s important to note, though, that your usage of the features is limited by how many “AI credits” you have, to really nail that slot machine user experience, and you’re only getting a limited number of those per month.
Luckily, existing Microsoft 365 subscribers can opt out of these new features and thus avoid the price increase, which is a genuinely welcome move by Microsoft. New subscribers, however, will not be able to opt out.
Finally, we understand that our customers have a variety of needs and budgets, so we’re committed to providing options. Existing subscribers with recurring billing enabled with Microsoft can switch to plans without Copilot or AI credits like our Basic plan, or, for a limited time, to new Personal Classic or Family Classic plans. These plans will continue to be maintained as they exist today, but for certain new innovations and features you’ll need a Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscription.
↫ Bryan Rognier at the Microsoft blog
Microsoft wants to spread the immense cost of running datacentres for “AI” to everyone, whether you want to use these features or not. When not enough people want to opt into “AI” and pay extra, the only other option is to just make everyone pay, whether they want to or not. Still, the opt-out for existing subscribers is nice, and if you are one and don’t want to pay $35 per year extra, don’t forget to opt out.
> Luckily, existing Microsoft 365 subscribers can opt out of these new features and thus avoid the price increase, which is a genuinely welcome move by Microsoft.
Can’t believe you fell for that one.
As a Dutchman you may also remember de NS voordeelurenkaart (changed to abonnement on the cards). You know, the one which they pinky promised one could keep subscribing to when new customers had to get a worse one? The one which, recently, the NS silently changed to aforementioned worse new subscription type?
I am so happy that I’m a Linux user. Microsoft is one of the best Linux promotors.
This has nothing to do with OS choice, Microsoft 365 Personal or Family works even on Desktop Linux via the Microsoft Office web apps, and you don’t need Microsoft 365 (or Microsoft Office in general) to use Windows (personally, I don’t have Microsoft Office on my Windows for the past 15 years, LibreOffice loads my old doc and ppt files just fine and all my new documents are on Google Docs).
Only Microsoft 365 Enterprise bundles a Windows license, but this isn’t available to non-Enterprise users anyway.
Please find a relevant article to post your “I am so happy that I’m a Linux user” spam.
This sounds basically the same thing they did with Teams, which the EU ended up slapping down. I have to think this might well be seen as anticompetitive bundling in the AI market.
$3 on top of the $6.99 is a 43% increase. Wooooot!!?
The joys of “software as a service”: Start them with a palatable price that’s about the price of one perpetual license per year, then crank up the price since customers have no perpetually licensed copy to fall back on.
The weird thing is that Microsoft still sells a perpetually licensed version of Office (2024), so I guess most people don’t mind getting ripped off by subscriptions.
You also get OneDrive cloud storage, which is the stuff where the price is really competitive compared to other cloud storage e.g. Dropbox or MEGA.