Bad news for users of Microsoft’s office suite. The company is in the process of sharply increasing the prices of all its plans, to include a questionable feature.
Microsoft’s most popular product is undoubtedly its office suite, Office, with its famous star software Word, Excel and PowerPoint. To use these applications, the company has for some time been encouraging its customers to adopt its Microsoft 365 plan, which provides access to certain tools in the office suite upon payment of a recurring subscription.
Compared to the classic purchase of a lifetime license, the proposition is rather interesting, because it allows you to regularly obtain new functions, install applications on several PCs at the same time and even share your subscription with several people. For example, the “Family” plan allows you to use the office suite on five computers simultaneously, and to share access with up to six people, all for €10 per month or €99 per year. And the personal subscription, for a single user and five devices, is even more competitive at just €7 per month and €69 per year.
Particularly economical and flexible offers for students, self-employed people, families or groups of people using several devices. However, these advantageous prices are likely to skyrocket very soon, with a change being deployed by Microsoft in several countries. As spotted by the Clubic site, in an article dated November 7, 2024 by Chloé Claessens, the company has just increased the cost of Microsoft 365 Family and Personal plans by $50 per year, all to add to the forceps a frankly dispensable function.
Once again, this is to promote Microsoft’s in-house artificial intelligence tool, Copilot. Until now, you had to take out a paid subscription of €30 per month to Copilot Pro to use “intelligent” assistance in applications in the Microsoft Office suite. Now, all users of Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plans have access to Copilot functions in Officehowever with a limited number of uses via a monthly credit system. Once the ceiling has been reached, you will then have to go through the Copilot Pro box, and therefore to the checkout.
The problem is that this “leader product”, in the form of integration of Copilot into all Microsoft 365 plans, is not free and therefore leads to a substantial increase in the annual cost of the subscription. For the moment, this price change only concerns New Zealand, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Australia. In the latter country, the Family and Personal plans saw their price increase by $50, bringing them to $179 and $159 per year, i.e. respective increases of 38% and 45%. And for the moment, no formula without Copilot seems to be offered.
Therefore, all Microsoft 365 customers will see the price of their subscription increase at its next renewal. And a little additional pettiness for subscribers to the Family plan, the Copilot functions will only be accessible to the main user, and not to people who share the subscription. If European countries, such as France, are not affected for the moment, certainly due to the rules on data protection and pricing changes during the contract, it is likely that Microsoft will gradually extend this new policy to the all of its customers around the world.