Microsoft 365 sees 43% price hike thanks to Copilot — existing customers safe until renewal
Microsoft 365 sees 43% price hike thanks to Copilot — existing customers safe until renewal
Meanwhile, smart people: I sure do love Libre Office.
Libre Office.
Honestly - and flame away - I hate the name. I hate saying it. It's the 'moist' of borrowed words. Leeeeeeeebr. And I'm a Canadian who did French up to university-level conversational "explain something for 20 min" French (from a gorgeous caribbean dynamo teacher, but I justif--uh, digress) so I know how to say the word and what it means.
And I still hate it. I'm a horrible person -- even before I continued French study because the prof was so engaging and energetic and brightened every room and every day and made French interesting just on inclusion.
Lee-bray
Glad I'm not the only one questioning the name! I have a pet theory that if they changed it it'd be more popular.
I feel bad for canadians learning french. It's a language that's only useful in like, 1.5 places in the world.
I genuinely believe french canadians are hurting their next generation by filling their heads with nonsense of a dying culture. Kind of like how racists fill their kids' heads with garbage because they're afraid of becoming irrelevant.
If smart people love libreoffice, then I must be dumb. Working with it always seems weird and I never like it.
Fortunately, I can use LaTeX for work; it is far from without issues but while being arcane sometimes (especially when tables are involved), it never really upsets me and the result looks very good. I can say neither for libreoffice or MS office. But at least the former doesn't charge for the experience.
I hope typst gains more traction; it seems really intuitive compared to TeX and you don't necessarily need a macro package. And while it doesn't produce the quality of TeX-based systems yet, it is already good. Then again, Knuth's goal first and foremost goal was quality (and it shows); the system just had to be usable by him.
Don't forget GPT4All or JanAI, for those rare instances that you want to converse with a dumbass.
OnlyOffice for those feeling that Office style itch.
You can call the sales team and ask them to change your subscription to the classic version to opt-out of Copilot and get the old price back, if you still need the subscription over changing to other open source office suites.
You don't have to contact them anymore.
That's what the support person said to me as well, but I didn't get that option when I tried to cancel the subscription. My guess is that it wasn't rolled out globally just yet, so if anyone didn't find this option you can just contact the sales team to downgrade.
This should be illegal.
I agree.
the only problem with onlyoffice is that it's electron.
Are you positive?
Ew
Ehh, I'm fairly sure it's not. It certainly wasn't in the past. When do you believe that changed?
Never mind, you were talking about OO, not LO, my bad.
https://forum.onlyoffice.com/t/why-does-it-contain-a-web-browser/8250/3
Chromium embedded framework, not electron. Similar concept, though.
So Libre Office is free?
If it does what regular office suit does i would happily pay 300 dollars for it to have it as mine and not be fucked with
Free forever, and works great.
Is this your first exposure to FOSS? If so, you are in for a treat. There’s a whole world of free, open source software out there for you to enjoy.
Yeah, it’s 100% free.
Free and open source, but if you're willing to pay, you could donate to the project.
For existing customers, the price hike won't be kicking in until plan renewal, and there are options to downgrade the plan. Those who want to avoid using AI can downgrade the plan to the "Classic" or "Basic" Microsoft 365 plans.
Thankfully we can roll back to the "Classic Family Plan" without the AI features. But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back. If I didn't see this article I'd be up for a big price hike when it renewed.
But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back.
Should be illegal.
"You remember that llm we spend billions of dollars on, that nobody asked for? Well we're done half baking it into all our apps and now we're almost doubling our prices to help pay for it all."
The logic of the utterly deranged...
They did the same with 3.5 jack removal from phones, charged more for less
So glad I got a free phone from Visible after they were going to update their network and claimed my Galaxy S8 wouldn't be compatible.
Best phone I ever had, and it has a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Suck on that, apple losers.
Oh shit maybe we'll see someone companies switch to an alternative instead of paying microshit more money
Yeah. So it's
right? I forget the name of that add-on.
No, that's not it. I thought it was Open-Xchange; yeah, that's it. But it's only web-based, and not Tbird-based. Let's ask Co-pilot again:
THERE it is.
But I learned there's a second alternative, so that's cool. See? Co-pilot has value!
Like using Edge to download Firefox, I approve
Zentyal replaces windows server. It has active directory, file server, print server, domain controller and mail server, all in a way compatible with Microsofts products, but it's Linux. I worked with it many years ago and it did what it says on the tin. I haven't worked with newer versions.
In this case the AI is kinda wrong. It's not a Thunderbird replacement in any way, rather an OWA replacement and Exchange alternative. You could use Thunderbird to connect to it probably.
What you could use is the Thunderbird extension TbSync, or Owl. Both work, but TbSync is free.
is there a thunderbird equivalent that looks like it was made after 1992?
This is for the personal licenses, not business or enterprise.
wack
I keep seeing posts by NextCloud on Mastodon. Has anyone had any experience using those guys?
Nextcloud is decent but it depends on what you want. Personally, I'd never use it again due to performance reasons but it's a decent platform for cloud editing and stuff.
I switched to Syncthing for file management across my devices. With it, I can sync my Joplin notes. It's all I need in life. It was also easier to set up than a Nextcloud instance.
nextcloud is awesome, highly recommend.
Wait, they think people want Copilot? Like enough to pay money for it?
They are banking on customers being too invested in office to switch.
I think that might be their plan for all their products at this point. Just existing though inertia.
That with a side of suppressing a competitor. Similar to how they include Teams for corporate plans. If it is included in your M$ apps suite, then your company might want to cut back on Slack and just make due.
It's a safe bet. I wonder if enterprise pricing is that high.
They don't, but by providing a "classic tier" they get to kill anyone's argument against it by saying "just don't get it", until they then discontinue the "classic tier" due to a "lack of demand", and force Office users to have AI and pay for it too.
Copilot for Teams is extremely useful. Recap meetings and being able to search for specific parts. People hate on AI but in this case they are definitely downplaying the capabilities.
But to be fair I'm not the one paying the bill
Man, I don't know about even that... It gets stuff wrong all the time. My boss LOVES his AI bot that joins all meetings (even if he doesn't) to summarize stuff. Occasionally I look over the summary it produces; it's about 50% actually correct, 25% ambiguous not wrong but not what I meant, and 25% flat out wrong / opposite of what I meant. I'm sure he relies on the results, ugh. One time I went through the summary and corrected it all, but I don't have time for that for all meetings.
If meetings are happening so long and going in so frequently that nobody can make sense of them without an ai summary, might I suggest there are too many meetings?
I say this as someone who used to work at a place that had meetings about meetings to figure out why so much time was wasted in meetings.
I doubt Microsoft Word has changed that much for me to theoretically subscribe just to see it's 365 counterpart. Still rocking the 2007 version.
Think of all the new words made since 2007 you won't be able to write on such an old version.
Like skibidi
Microsoft probably added or changed unnecessary shit to the OOXML format that your old version can't handle.
Do all documents open without any problems?
I will forever hate 2007's ribbon with a passion.
Me too haha. One of the first things I install.
It hasn't.
Same here.
Clippy is back!
GOZER
The choice is made. The Traveller has come.
VENKMAN
We didn't choose anything?!! I didn't think of an image, did you?
SPENGLER
No.
WINSTON
My mind's a total void!
[They all look at Ray]
RAY
I couldn't help it! It just popped in
there!
VENKMAN
What? What just popped in there?
If they dressed it up as Clippy I wouldn't be mad, tbh.
worlds most over glorified over priced office website that runs like a slug
For anyone who doesn't already know the good FOSS alternatives:
FOSS GPT: GPT4ALL
I use ms office 2007 it runs perfectly in wine and still has the cool version of wordart
I'm so glad I work in an industry where I can get away with using Libre Office.
Preaching to the choir here but LibreOffice has been excellent since my MSOffice license expired. Unless you're working in an enterprise setting with MS-specific macros or online collaboration, there's no reason to be paying for basic document editing software in 2025.
There are also self-hosted and open-sourced collaborative editing suites available that I haven't tried yet, but there are plenty of options
Even if you need microsoft office for some random file you can use their free web version. Well it's been a couple years since I last needed it I'm assuming it still exists
Fair enough, but if you're trying to avoid data collection then open-sourced projects are preferable
Does it save files locally or only cloud? I want to move away from google docs/sheets.
I think locally only, LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.
why not just do:
microsoft 365: 6.99
microsoft 365 + copilot: 9.99
You damn well know why they dont do that $$$
… second paragraph of the article:
In addition to the basic plans getting Copilot rolled in, there are now additional "Basic," "Personal Classic," and "Family Classic" tiers without Copilot and "other advanced features" added for users who do not use AI in their workflows
Hey guys, let's stop ending prices in .99 in our social interactions.
It's a relic that only exists to take advantage of people's psychology. We shouldn't be doing the dirty work for corporations.
Here, let me help:
why not just do:
microsoft 365: $7
microsoft 365 + copilot: $10
Don't type more so you can help businesses fool people into thinking prices are lower than they actually are.
They did exactly that, except they changed the name of the original subscription to "classic" and upgraded everyone to the more expensive plan without asking.
This is actually illegal in some countries, and I hope they get fined for it.
I'm sure they will get fined for it, and the fine will be considerably less than the extra money they take in from people who don't notice...
why not just do:
microsoft 365: 6.99
microsoft 365 + copilot: 9.99
Make the easy thing the better-for-sales thing, obviously.
But seriously, negative-approval has been a sales enabler for ever. People will often just roll over and accept it vs churning to something else. That's why 'loss-leader' works, as people will start with one product and sunk-cost fallacy will keep them from churning as the vendor tightens the screw.
Moar profit.
Because they're fucking stupid and thinks fucking over their customers brings in more profit.
Fun story, it's called office 365 as when you see the price you'll turn 365 degrees and walk away.
Ok that doesn't really work but God I love that stupid joke.
Anyway I haven't used office personally for ages and never seem to run into real compatibility issues with the meager personal/business overlap in my situation.
It made me chuckle a little imaging that you do a full 365 degree spin Infront of Microsoft and then walk away (in an awkward way), instead of 180 degrees to walk the opposite direction haha
Technically speaking with 365* of rotation if you are far enough away you will be able to walk past microsoft, so this is possible.
365 spin, then realizing your mistake and awkwardly walking backwards out of the room
At the right distance it's just enough pivot to give them a spiteful shoulder check on the way out.
Subscriptions like these have always been a scam.
Fuck the MS suite is such garbage. My work was sold in for Teams with all the BS. Now I have to either map up the filepath creating what we used to have, or I can't see the file folder and make a call at the same time. Onenote with it's arbitrary syncing. And good luck finding it again since it stored at some random place if you loose access.
Word and excel is decent, but for a person who likes to tinker with versions it's a nightmare to invite people to edit it.
Cluncky interface, slow and bloated all around
The degree to which MS Teams can get fucked by the horse it rode in on is proportional to the number of registry entries their bloatware has on first install.
It's very "lipstick on a pig", but you can run the PWA side by side with the native desktop. I have many screens so I keep non-call activity in the PWA version to avoid this nonsense.
I'm sure they will add tabs eventually as an afterthought and make it even more obtuse though.
I also reflexively delete the personal OneNotes and start a new one where I want it to be, but the war between me and Microsoft about how I want my personal documents stored has now raged for many many years.
There are home users of Microsoft 365?
I'm not shaming but I kinda am. Like WTF is wrong with you? You pay for free shit.
Office employees don't get to choose.
Actually I have admin access to my work laptop, so while my employer pays for what ever the fuck they pay for I frequently use FOSS instead.
I do it to make a point.
They bundle it in laptop purchases. M$ dominate because of the b2b stitch up.
COPILOT IS NOW A PAID FEATURE?????? hell nah, microsoft be banking on their users.
Quickest enshittification.
Fr
The fact that people are subscribing to office software is the biggest problem here. What sort of technical breakthroughs require so many updates that a subscription is necessary?
As much as they are pushing to stop 1 time purchases of office, they do still offer it. I purchased a license for like $20 off a discount site for Office 2021, and i have no clue why people need a subscription plan for this. It would take some very specific needs for that to ever be needed and I'm sure a huge percentage would be just fine with the 1 time purchase that lasts 3-4 years of support.
As for businesses that part stinks... once you get integrated with all the services offered, it's going to take a lot to back out since it's not just office they are probably subscribed to but everything else that enterprise has to offer. They are absolutely banking on people to suck it up and accept the position they are in and give in. It's awful, but at the same time if your business went all in and didn't anticipate this then they didn't do their job if you ask me when vetting everything. This feels similar to the recent buyout of VMware and are now pushing insane new license costs. The problem is they went to high where despite the effort it will take to change products people have to. We can only hope Microsoft is on the edge of crossing that line.
Privacy-stealing telemetry changes often, so the subscription is to make sure that's updated and works. You gotta pay for the privilege of being datarummaged by the likes of Microsoft The Great.
They need money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
money to fix all the exploits in that spaghetti software.
This decade for SURE! We promise!
the technical breakthrough of increasing shareholder value
Excel has most businesses in a headlock. Can't see why anyone else pays for M$. I have Office, but it's a permanent license from my last job. When I upgrade, say bye bye.
Exactly, the only reason I have the subscription is for Excel and OneDrive. My NAS and home network is still not good enough to cover the backup needs of my whole family.
"The cost of running the hallucination machine is too expensive so instead of charging people who want to use it, we have instead decided to charge everyone who uses any of our services even if they don't want to use the hallucination machine"
I’ve had nothing but issues administrating Office 365. A price hike like this is incentivizing me to push other products like Google workspace.
Nice parts are definitely user email tools and some of the audit tools, but I keep finding myself in scenarios where I get error 500s on the server side when I pop open dev tools and it’s like I don’t want to tell my users that they’re SOL but they sort of are if I can’t resolve some error on Microsoft’s o365 servers. Microsoft likes to ask what I did to fix the case if I fix it before they do and I just laugh and not rely to those. They can pay me extra for that or hire me if they want that info.
Phew, this was a good reminder since I was meaning to cancel my subscription anyway. It was going to auto renew in 2 days. 😬
This is like adding ESPN to the live TV package.
So glad I never had to deal with cable, or internet companies.
Just $25/month with Visible and I have unlimited data with tethering.
Wow Lotta folks gonna discover that LibreOffice is much better than MS Office. Not to mention, free.
Make it too expensive and people will switch to Google docs.
Google workspace just pulled the same crap with Gemini
Last week at us.
First question I asked the evil twin was: "How can I deactivate Gemini and never hear from it again?" Support article poped up, where must opt out from some Labs setting or some bs, but only a workspace admin can do it.
Ended up with blocking that flare button with uBo. Problem solved.
The point is it's free.
Excel is the deal breaker on that. My last company was all Google products and auth, but I still had to buy Excel for the accounting and HR teams.
The fact it costs anything at all, let alone a subscription, should be enough for the working class to seek other options.
This generation has sold itself out to the lowest bidder.
If they actually bundled a game pass subscription with it and made a proper Microsoft complete subscription they could have softened the bad press they're getting on this (and giving customers something they've wanted for a while)
That and the fact that they've nearly doubled the price of the subscription to add a limited credit based feature just looks pretty slimy
bundled a game pass subscription
Most of the money MS gets from Office365 is from business users, not home users. I have a feeling that trying to sell game pass to corporate clients isn't going to be a huge hit...
Sure and it would be silly to mess with the professional tiers
But personal and family subscriptions are fairly squarely positioned towards non-business users as their main demographics, from what I can see.
Why on earth would they bundle gamepass into Office365? Office365 is pretty much used for business and educational institutions. Everybody else is a rounding error.
The overlap between Office365 owners and Xbox gamers is extremely small.
You'd just end up pissing everybody off by combining them
And not to defend MS, but a 43% increase isn't nearly doubling. A 100% increase would be doubling.
It's called Microsoft 365 now
Office 365 was when it was just a business productivity suite
They renamed it when they pivoted it to a general subscription and started adding things like clipchamp.
I mentioned in another comment though that I agree it would be silly to mess with the professional skus, but the home & family ones would make perfect sense to offer as an option at the very least (just as they're offering 365 without copilot for the time being).
I'm also not saying get rid of the independent subscriptions for Xbox, that would also be silly.
Just that a merged one would make a lot of sense for the people out there paying for both (which I reckon is a good number in the family subscription category at least)
So I've never used Microsoft office because I could never afford it. I went from notepad to wordpad to OpenOffice to libreoffice. I've never had a single issue even as a professional not using word. I actually really enjoy writing as a hobby and I just don't get this copiolet thing. Why would I want something to do the thing I like doing? Screw that.
For professional settings, I understand the theoretical appeal of ai writing. A lot of people don't like writing emails, but they have to for work. Many of those same people fret about tone or presentation, because silly office politics reasons (real or one-sidedly imagined in their heads.)
The solution, really is workplaces just need to cut down on the useless drivel emails and people need to be ok with short, no frills emails.
There are tons more applications in the workplace. For example, one of the people in my team is dyslexic and sometimes needs to write reports that are a few pages long. For him, having the super-autocorrect tidy up his grammar makes a big difference.
Sometimes I have a list of say 200 software changes that would be a pain to summarise, but where it's intuitively easy for me to know if a summary is right. For something like a changelog I can roll the dice with the hallucination machine until I get a correct summary, then tidy it up. That takes less than a tenth of the time than writing it myself.
Sometimes writing is necessary and there's no way to cut down the drivel unfortunately. Talking about professional settings of course - having the Large Autocorrect writing a blog post or a poem for you is a total misuse of the tool in my opinion.
They should have made it opt-in instead of opt-out IMHO. You can still get the old subscription when you renew, but you have to jump through a couple of hoops. If you do nothing you just get "upgraded" for no reason.
apparently super easy to get it forever free
Not if you're a company, since in order for it to remain free you need to disable certain telemetry files, and in some office there's bound to be a person fucking things up, and then you're on the hook big time.
I've been using one drive for my phone photos backup, joplin notes store and keepass. It seemed like the most economical solution cus other vendors don't really offer 1TB, it's usually something stupid like jumping from 200GB or 2TB. Don't know if I should invest in a NAS or something, but I just don't wanna deal with the hardware and networking if I have to open some ports at home , unless I can use cloudflare as well
Look into Syncthing if you have a home server - very easy phone backups that cost nothing.
Immich is a self hosted service that imitates Google photos Tailscale is an easy way to access your network remotely
More anti consumer garbage forced by a monopolistic juggernaut which the governments of the world refuse to do more than mildly scold. It's worse than chatgpt and pops up almost everywhere you click. Something about heads in asses
Makes me glad I continue to use the free Google and MS Office options and keep my cloud storage with a service that is dedicated to just storage.
Cuts down on all of the forced price increases due to the AI mess the MBAs need to justify the expense of.
Would I see Copilot in the OHook'd Office 365? If not, yay!
I guess I should be happy I applied a work discount, which extended my subscription until Oktober 2026 or something.
Damn, we really didn't see that coming now did we? Can't wait until Amazon pulls that trigger on AWS.
Big corps will hang on regardless :/
I spent about 20 minutes today trying to get Copilot on Word to tell me how to disable Copilot on Word. Worth every penny.
The clippy we all deserved
I really wonder what their long term plan is here.
Hardly anyone really wants copilot, it doesn't add a lot of value, yet makes the product less competitive.
I totally get rent seeking, Office is so ingrained that it's almost impossible to get away from it. But why force AI on everybody? Why not add it as a bonus?
Is this just a desperate attempt to soften the massive losses of the AI investment?
To please the shareholders. Then, when AI is no longer deemed valuable and its tremendous costs sink in, they will remove it and layoff the teams that worked on it, to please the shareholders.
It's not for you. It's for them. Copilot digests everything you type into the Office apps, and it provides them with millions of real writing examples that are free from copyright (read the new Office EULA).
The AI hardware isn't for us. It's for Google and Microsoft, so they can steal your computer's CPU time and hard drive space so they can build their own personal Skynets. (Same thing with CoPilot, which requires 50gigs of your hard drive space. You're also paying for the privilege of being spied on, which is nice for them, I guess.)
First thing I do with the Google Assistent on Android Phones is to tell it to disable itself. Cool thing is that it does.
You can do that??
Just call the sales team and get the classic plan. No more having to deal with Copilot and you get the old price back.