MS365 Price Increase

MS365 Price Increase. a reader asks…

I read that Microsoft is increasing the price of their 365 subscription, by like 30%! Ostensibly the increase is due to adding Copilot to the Office apps. Like others, I don’t want to use Copilot and don’t think I should have to pay for something I have no intention of using. Do I have any options?

Short answer, yes. Longer answer is it depends on what type of MS365 subscription you’ve got. Microsoft announced the price increase effective January 16, 2025 for Personal and Family plans worldwide. Microsoft says that on your next subscription renewal you’ll automatically pay the higher price. You do have options though: you can switch to another subscription plan that does not include Copilot or AI credits for Copilot such as Microsoft 365 basic, or, for a limited time, to their new Microsoft 365 Personal Classic (single user) or Microsoft 365 Family Classic (up to six people) plans. (link to the Microsoft announcement).

Of course, the way to do this is not quite as simple as that. Their instructions say to go to your subscriptions page (link here), sign in with your Microsoft account, find your subscription and select manage > Cancel subscription. You’ll then see an option to downgrade to Microsoft 365 Personal Classic or Microsoft 365 Family Classic, or another plan that works for you. That’s supposed to be it, however I haven’t tried this myself so I can’t say how much Microsoft’s website will try to get you to stay on the plan that includes Copilot.

If you read my other article Dump Copilot, that simply disables Copilot from Microsoft 365 without affecting your subscription otherwise. And the instructions above only remove Copilot from your Microsoft 365 subscription, they don’t affect how Copilot is integrated with your Windows operating system. You may have seen the Copilot icon in your Windows taskbar, and while you really can’t disable it system-wide, you can simply remove the icon by right-clicking on it, and then selecting (left-click) “Unpin from Taskbar”. This doesn’t disable Copilot, it’s too deeply embedded in the operating system.

If you have a non-personal edition of Microsoft and you’re in control of your subscription, you can switch to either Microsoft 365 Basic or Office Home 2024 that don’t include Copilot. If your employer controls your edition of Microsoft 365 and you don’t want to use Copilot, follow my instructions in the other article to disable Copilot in your MS365 apps. Please note that your employer may have group policies in place that restrict what settings changes you can make.

As I mentioned in my other article about Copilot, you may want to consider giving AI a fair shake – it’s not going away and will continue to become more and more a part of everyone’s daily (digital) life.