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You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase
- orionblastar 2y agoI use LibreOffice instead of Microsoft 365. It is free and can load and save DOCX files. Plus I use LibreOffice in GNU/Linux so it is cross-platform and compatible.
- gerdesj 2y agoI own a MS Silver Partner (int al). They (MS) are a handy place to stuff things for a while until something better comes along and I have lots of options. It takes a while to scale! At the moment, dumping VMware is taking quite a lot of my time too.
- lolc 2y agoI went to the trouble of looking up what that Silver Partner thing is. It means you're paying more than $1k to MS annually. You "own" a subscription? What does it do for you? I still don't understand the rest of your comment.
- cratermoon 2y ago> What does it do for you? It means you can put "Microsoft Partner" on your sales and marketing communications and some people will throw money at you just for having that on your shingle. In some cases businesses won't contract with anyone who doesn't have partner status.
- fencepost 2y agoIt means you can resell Microsoft products with some reasonable level of margin. To be a Silver or Gold partner direct with Microsoft (vs 'indirect' partners through a distributor like Ingram) you're probably collecting that margin on US$10,000+ per month, possibly much more.
- cratermoon 2y agoI tend to write in markdown. If someone needs a Word Doc/docx whatever format they're using these days, I use pandoc to generate it. If someone sends me a docx file, I can read it with my choice of software without paying the MS tax. On the very rare occasion someone sends me a docx file that they need me to edit and send back to them, I'll do it with whatever is handy and if they complain I messed up their formatting or whatever I can blame Word bugs.
- mickael-kerjean 2y agoIn the web side of things, collabora has gotten so much better as well, see by yourself: https://demo.filestash.app/login?type=tmp&next=/view/tmp.docx&userID=KDtVgvEm2ae5 https://demo.filestash.app/login?type=tmp&next=/view/tmp.doc...
- presentation 2y agoMaybe it just isn't optimized for Safari, but it was very sluggish the moment I opened it on my M4 Pro MacBook, which isn't promising.
- scarface_74 2y agoAnd it doesn’t run on iPhones, iPads and I just can’t use it on the web like I can with GSuite, Office or even Apple’s iWorks
- m463 2y agodoes libreoffice actually work with doc/docx well? I remember I tried this years ago, and it broke all the formatting that other window users see.
- MonkeyClub 2y agoIt works better than Microsoft's, that's the issue. Office purposefully doesn't follow its own documents' standards, and renders with particular quirks, so that one gets the experience you report.
- thisislife2 2y agoLibreOffice is excellent. An alternate to it is OnlyOffice, which is a bit more polished (and Enterprisy) and has a free option too - https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx https://www.onlyoffice.com/download-desktop.aspx
- uselpa 2y agoLibreOffice is awful on macOS. Also, file compatibility with MS Office is still problematic. Onlyoffice is indeed a better choice.
- Spooky23 2y agoNotice the glowing pr articles about how Satya’s Microsoft is so amazing and not like the old chiseling for cash Microsoft are gone. Time to collect the rent, peasants.
- cwillu 2y agoToday's microsoft is exactly what yesterday's microsoft always wanted to be; software subscriptions have been the goal for decades.
- tdb7893 2y agoI think the big tech companies have set standards so low that's it's often easy to look good by comparison. By the standards of big tech this is pretty small potstoes as egregious cash grabs go
- phatskat 2y agoYes and…egregious doesn’t necessarily have to be a per-unit metric. A quick and poorly done google suggests close to 400 million paid 365 seats. It’s hard to know the business vs personal count so let’s halve it: that’s still $10 billion in new money coming in if those users don’t know they have a choice to not pay more.
- Quiza12 2y agoSame tactic for the Evernote increase. Finally dumped it for Joplin and haven't looked back.
- pridkett 2y agoEvernote also had an ownership change as they were sold to Bending Spoons. Bending Spoons then moved development to Europe and raised prices.
- rednafi 2y agoBending Spoons is an Italian sweatshop with a ton of cash lying around. Anything they touch turns into poop, and as an employer, their reputation is terrible. But somehow, they have a ton of cash influx that they use to acquire struggling businesses quite frequently.
- benatkin 2y agoThe enpoopification of Evernote was already well underway by the time they acquired it. https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/14/evernote_api_limits/ https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/14/evernote_api_limits/
- rednafi 2y agoEvernote used to be a one-of-a-kind product. It made a lot of key people filthy rich, and then it sort of lost traction. I was listening to Gergely Orosz’s podcast[1] on Bending Spoons and found out that Evernote’s codebase was a complete mess and beyond repair. [1]: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rules-of-building-software https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
- geodel 2y agoBeside Evernote which I never used I like the word enpoopification which has nicer ring to it than enshittification. I see just so much potential to it. It could be linkedIn profiles: Leader|Innovator|Enpooper . Enpoopies awards/badges on forums for questions or blogs like "How can/did we replace aging RabbitMQ setup with Kubernetes-Kafka-Cluster"
- lallysingh 2y ago"Frankly, we feel this is a flagrant breach of goodwill and trust for Microsoft’s customers" Clearly they haven't been Microsoft customers very long, if there's still goodwill and trust.
- sexy_seedbox 2y agoWait till you find out about Microsoft Dynamics 365 increasing their dataverse storage from US$9.95 to US$40 per GB/month!
- gwerbret 2y agoI feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era. I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day. So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost? That vendor lock-in is obviously part of the con (see for instance the complete and very deliberate lack of portability of documents created in OneNote, if you don't have the Professional/Enterprise version). And there are innumerable better services out there, many of which are even free.
- aetherspawn 2y agoWe use so many SaaS I'm not sure it's worth resisting anymore. Microsoft 365. Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business. Job tracking system. Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible. Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible. Miro. Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version. This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all? I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees. I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.
- nickelpro 2y agoI cannot think of a single non-business oriented user who needs MS365 Trivial personal users moved to free alternatives ages ago, business users are either using organizational licenses or are small-business users who aren't using family plans to begin with. I'm mystified by who the affected audience is of this.
- fencepost 2y agoM365 Personal or Family can actually have a place as cost-effective cloud storage that 'just works' for consumers that don't care to go down the self hosting rabbit hole. It happens to include an office apps suite, but even without that it's extremely price competitive with other consumer-focused cloud storage. For $6-7/month you get 1TB of online storage, or for $8.25-10/month you get up to 6TB. Their competition (Apple, Google, Dropbox) pretty much all start at $10/mo for 2TB, possibly with paying for a year in advance. The business plans are a different matter, but can make sense particularly if you're actually paying salary/wages for someone to maintain and support a self-hosted alternative.
- bubblethink 2y agoNobody moved to free alternatives. All the normies pay for Office. The cheapskates pirate it. The whole world runs on Office.
- KTibow 2y agoI think that's an exaggeration, I know a few Google school districts and companies.
- jerrac 2y agoMakes me wonder what it would take for governments to actually hit Microsoft hard enough for it to hurt. I remember when they were hit with anti-trust fines here in the USA due to how they were bundling Internet Explorer as the default browser. I mean, did they ever stop? I can't recall ever turning on a new Windows install in the past couple decades and not having IE or Edge as the default. It also makes me wonder what it would take for IT people to finally stop gritting their teeth about having to use, or having to let others use, Windows and start just dealing with the learning curve of switching to some Linux distro. I mean, Windows Recall is spyware. If it didn't come from Microsoft, Windows Defender would be sure to mark it as malicious... What's the name for a screenshot based keylogger I wonder... I used to just figure that Windows was just all some people could use. And if that was the best tool for them, then ok. But now? I can't say that anymore. It's out and out malware at this point. In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS? Or is there something good about Windows that you like?
- Aurornis 2y ago> In all seriousness, if you are sticking with Windows at this point, why? Is it just the fact your other software doesn't work on another OS? That’s not really a minor point. It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal. Even for certain CAD software I use that has Mac and Windows versions, the Windows version feels so much more performant and responsive. I’ll switch to Windows for anything serious. Also, YMMV, but in the past 5 or so years my Windows workstation has felt less buggy and more stable than my Macs. I’ve dealt with a lot of annoying quirks on the Mac over the years where the only solution is to wait for the next update and hope it’s fixed. Even today, accessing network file shares is incredibly buggy on Mac in certain cases.
- jerrac 2y agoI daily drive Linux for everything except games, and gaming on Linux has come far enough that I'll be switching over soon. My 60+ father also uses Linux for most of what he does. And, yes, software working on your OS is not a minor point. That's the whole reason I used to go with the "best tool for the job" approach. Windows Recall is what changed that for me. I can't see using an OS with spyware built in as a "feature". In my opinion, Apple is no more trustworthy than Microsoft, so... > It’s a big deal for people who do things other than use a browser, text editor, and terminal. So, the number of video editing, photo editing, CAD, gaming, and so on tools that work on Linux has grown a LOT. It's not just for basic stuff. You can do almost anything you need to on Desktop Linux. Yes, a lot of things are rough around the edges, but they're that way because people haven't invested in them, not because they're bad tools.
- rednafi 2y agoHow’s that a surprise? Microsoft dangles npm, TypeScript, GitHub, and VSCode, and suddenly people develop collective amnesia about their past behavior.
- gruez 2y agoTo be fair, I doubt anyone working at a publication that has articles like "Ferry cancellations and delays: your rights" and "What to consider when joining a gym" on the front page knows about microsoft's involvement in npm, TypeScript, GitHub, or VSCode.
- rednafi 2y agoThose two titles are funny as hell
- BigJono 2y agoTS, GitHub, VSCode and ChatGPT are going to make the EEE days look bush league. There's an entire new generation of programmers that have a visceral hatred for doing any unassisted programming or writing a single line of code they could have downloaded off NPM. They're going to be 100% non functional when that stuff isn't around for them, so the industry can expect to get absolutely fucking raped when that bill comes due. Would be a good time to invest in Microsoft if they weren't shitting the bed so badly on everything else.
- dsukhin 2y agoFor those unaware, if you want to use the latest Office Suite (2024), but don’t want to pay a monthly fee, Microsoft still offers a one time purchase [0] for $149.99 which is now cheaper than the (new) one year subscription (with no cloud storage of course). [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-2024/cfq7ttc0pqvj https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
- climb_stealth 2y agoThanks for linking it! Looks like it is just a license for a single machine. So that still hurts :/
- carbocation 2y ago> For non-commercial use What the hell
- lolinder 2y agoThat's for the Home version, the business one is here (and $100 more expensive): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-business-2024/CFQ7TTC0PBM7 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...
- bonestamp2 2y agoAnd it includes Outlook.
- globular-toast 2y agoIt's not free software. What did you expect? There's a reason the Free Software Foundation added freedom 0: > The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose
- thebruce87m 2y agoClippy AI: Hey, it looks like you’re writing a letter FOR WORK >:-(
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- datahack 2y agoOffice is so 20th century.
- duxup 2y agoI get why they bundle in the AI update and blame the cost on that ... but it would almost be interesting to see that if it was up front people would chose it if it was more transparent. Less money overall maybe, but also tell you if people want it / see the value...
- stephen_g 2y agoI think they tried that, but not enough people care enough about it to pay the higher price, and Microsoft needs to justify the amount of cash they’ve poured into generative AI. Hence why they’re raising prices to make everybody pay for it even if most users don’t want the features and don’t use them…
- datavirtue 2y agoMicrosoft Partner Network. $500 a year includes five seats of Office 365 Enterprise and $100 a month in Azure credit. On top of Visual Studio Pro and a bunch of other perks.
- jukkan 2y agoThat Action Pack is retiring on Jan 22. New partner benefits subscriptions start with the Partner Launch one: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/membership/partner-launch-benefits https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/membership/...
- datavirtue 2y agoHmmm...it's like $200 cheaper now...
- monomial 2y agoI find it increasingly hard to justify any sort of SaaS subscription these days. Is the value you get out of Microsoft 365 really that much greater than any of the open source alternatives? So much better that you let a corporation dictate the terms of your computing environment? It honestly makes me angry. And I say that as someone who works in the industry for a SaaS company. The only SaaS I reluctantly pay for is Fastmail and that's only because it's basically impossible to host your own email these days if you care about your email actually getting delivered to all those Gmail and Outlook inboxes out there.
- speedgoose 2y agoMicrosoft 365 is good value, and it comes with many services. I wouldn’t have a personal license but it makes a lot of sense at work if you don’t mind sharing your data with USA.
- what-the-grump 2y agoAre you kidding me? For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / products. Let's list some major ones. Exchange online with 100GB mailbox. Onedrive with 1TB storage Sharepoint with 1TB storage allocation as I am 1 user Full desktop office applications Full browser office applications Forms - so basically functional enough SurveyMonkey Teams Planner Bookings, so Calendly... Anti-virus MDM MAM Windows 10/11 Enterprise AAD, a full identity provider with MFA, SCIM, Federation, support for 1000s of integrations A ton of security and audit features to go with all of this. There is nothing even close to this... adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO...
- bonestamp2 2y ago> adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO They now have a $10/mo plan where you pick any one application.
- graemep 2y ago> For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / product How many of those do you use?
- Havoc 2y ago> That’s when a new option will miraculously appear – Microsoft 365 Classic, which has no price increase or Copilot AI. In other words, it’s your old plan. That seems almost malicious
- mike503 2y agoThey have to keep jacking up prices so their SAFe(TM) certified trainers, scrum masters, coaches, consultants and such can continue to provide additional value
- sys_64738 2y agoWould most folk notice any difference using Google Docs or iCloud docs for free? I don't get the rationale for paying for an word processor monthly. Is it the fuzzy, warm feeling that using Microsoft gives you?
- AndyKelley 2y agoRecommended strategy instead: 1. Change your credit card number so that you cannot be billed anymore 2. Use a free and open source alternative. They're good enough at this point Otherwise you're just funding their grift.
- scarface_74 2y agoWhat free and open source alternative works on my iPhone/ipad?
- thisislife2 2y agoDon't know about opensource, but it's free for Desktop and has mobile versions - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onlyoffice-documents/id944896972 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/onlyoffice-documents/id9448969...
- scarface_74 2y agoFree isn’t the issue. Google’s office products are free, have mobile apps that work offline and while a desktop app isn’t a big deal for me, some who travel for work and use a laptop that may not have internet access all of the time - mostly on a plane - might care. WiFi is available on most planes and free with some airlines but is unreliable. If you are in the Apple ecosystem, iWorks is free, has iOS and desktop versions for the Mac and a web version. But it’s the same argument for Windows users I had for GSuite. The poster I replied to cares about open source I assume.
- oefrha 2y agoThis tactic is more common than you’d think. It usually goes like <amount> off the first period, regular price afterwards. Wait you want to cancel? How about this <amount> coupon for your next <period> as well? I’ve seen that many times.
- methou 2y agothe only reason Im still paying for M365 is that my grandpa can't use anything else than MS Word, despite of all the awful changes MS made to its UI thought out the years. Old people stubborness can be interesting. Maintening that subscription is a pain, as MS occasionally change default save location to SharePoint. I'm the sole admin and I've never touched any thing.
- TiredOfLife 2y ago> despite of all the awful changes MS made to its UI thought out the years Which ones?
- noisy_boy 2y agoI just use Libreoffice for home needs. My daughter has access to Libreoffice too but prefers to use Google docs for everything. I think there is a whole generation of students growing up on Google docs, mainly pushed by schools, and that will have some impact on office productivity space in another 10-15 years when they start to work.
- photon_rancher 2y agoYour estimate is late by almost 20 years - the first of that generation graduated high school ten years ago. But the problem is that over those ten years google docs mostly feels like it’s been enshittified. Today’s office suites all suck I just want office 2007 or the google docs beta experience back - those were snappy and obvious how to use. Even basic stuff like linear regression in excel is terrible UX these days And so mostly they don’t care to push it and if they do it’s not a material over modern office anyway.
- noisy_boy 2y agoI'm not sure if ChromeOS was also as pervasive 20 years ago as it is now. With its prevalence, the only office suite most students know is Google docs.
- pjerem 2y ago> But crucially, 365 plans don’t provide unlimited access to Copilot – that requires an extra $37/month subscription called Copilot Pro. Instead, the plans provide a bank of 60 credits per month, where each credit pays for one action that makes use of Copilot. Wow I missed this part of the story. It’s incredibly shitty. The are basically making the whole world pay $5 a month for a _trial _ of Copilot ?
- kkfx 2y agoI have an even cheaper suggestion: doing like me, using org-mode for notes and small potatoes computation, Python for more complex stuff, rarely Maxima CAS, and LaTeX to produce documents. All these tools offer much bigger features set, much bigger flexibility, produce much better results and are FLOSS tools. Seriously the MIT Missing Semester MUST be a high-schools mandatory course, anyone who want to have a non-mere-manual profession must have passed this course. We are in damn 2025, it's about time to recognize that computers are the mean of knowledge like papers and libraries before, not knowing how to use them properly means being illiterate, even with some PhDs.
- VyseofArcadia 2y agoFor some reason there is this pervasive attitude that it's ok to not be good with computers, the same way it's ok to be bad at math. It is a socially acceptable thing to be bad at, even if you use computers for work every single day. This is paired with the weirdly pervasive attitude that any tool with a learning curve is bad. Throw in the siren song of "good enough", and you have swathes of people who are completely uninterested in choosing the best tool for the job and instead choose the easiest tool for the job.
- gherkinnn 2y ago> Rather than sneaking an extra $5 a month, perhaps Microsoft should focus its efforts on making Copilot valuable enough that its customers will actually be willing to pay for it. Someone at MS with a sleek haircut will hold a PPT demonstrating how both Copilot usage and subscription income went up.
- heisenbit 2y agoOnce upon a time Microsoft was forced to unbundle Explorer which they pushed bundled with Windows. I just wonder whether here we not again have Microsoft leveraging their office monopoly to gain market share by unfair means.
- hulitu 2y ago> Once upon a time Microsoft was forced to unbundle Explorer which they pushed bundled with Windows. They have now Edge. With the same characteristics.
- NotMichaelBay 2y agoIf anyone would like to try an alternative to Copilot for Excel, I've been working on an addin that is designed more for advanced users who know what they want. It's currently free while it's in beta and I gather feedback to improve it. It can be used to quickly add conditional formatting rules, charts, pivot tables, formulas, perform data manipulation tasks that you would have to use VBA for, etc. It's also private - it doesn't include the data in prompts, only metadata (table headers, etc). I'm sending invites out as they are requested. You can request an invite here: https://www.incant.app/ https://www.incant.app/
- Yeul 2y agoPirating Office is as simple as downloading a GitHub script. Microsoft stopped giving a shit about it. Enterprise will pay.
- raxxor 2y agoSo Microsoft believes it can only sell its AI application through a significant dark pattern. That isn't very convincing advertising for copilot at all.
- maxehmookau 2y agoThis is gross, and should be illegal. Absolutely get in the bin with this nonsense.
- hyruo 2y agoA few years ago, I saw that OneDrive announced plans to launch its own AI-powered facial recognition grouping feature, but as of 2025, the feature still hasn't been released. I don't think I'll be paying for it anymore.
- apple4ever 2y agoI REALLY don't want any AI junk in my apps, and I especially don't want to pay extra for it. Apple AI is terrible and Microsoft's is likely the same.
- fowl2 2y agoHuh. Apparently the “current plan without AI” is $20 more expensive than “current plan”. Guess I’m grandfathered or something.
- type0 2y ago> You have to pretend to cancel your plan! you shouldn't pretend, just cancel your plan, do it!