Microsoft has increased the prices of Microsoft 365 subscriptions. But you get access to Copilot with the subscription.

You may be aware that the company launched a premium plan called Microsoft Copilot Pro, which allowed subscribers to access advanced AI models with higher usage limits.  Microsoft is pushing artificial intelligence more aggressively, by introducing Copilot

Bryan Rognier, Vice President, Microsoft 365 Consumer, announced on the company's blog, that the service now has 84 million consumer subscribers. Microsoft 365 users can now access Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and via the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. Another new addition to the subscription is the new Microsoft Designer app, which you can use to create, i.e. generate images. The app comes with AI editing tools that can be helpful to erase unwanted objects from photos.

The announcement highlights various benefits of using AI in Office apps, but also mentions something that could be considered controversial, AI Credits. I explained how AI credits work in Notepad's Rewrite, well it's more of the same with Office apps.  Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers will be allocated AI credits to use across apps on a monthly basis. Need more? Well, you will have to subscribe to Copilot Pro to access the AI without usage limits.

Naturally, such advanced features come at a cost, to the user that is, hence the price hike.

Microsoft 365 Personal and Family prices increased

The price of Microsoft 365 subscriptions have been increased by $3 per month, and this change impacts both Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions. This is the first price hike for the subscription service, which debuted in 2013.

Prior to the price increase, users were able to subscribe to Microsoft 365 Personal for $69.99 per year, or Microsoft 365 Family plan for $99.99 per year. The latter lets up to 6 users access the service. The price hike is not exclusive to the U.S., it applies globally, and it has come into effect already.

Let's take a brief look at how much it costs in the U.S., U.K., and Europe. A Microsoft 365 Personal now costs $99.99/£84.99/€99,00 per year, while an annual subscription for Microsoft 365 Family costs $129.99/£104.99/€129,00. You can visit the official website to check the price of Microsoft 365 in your region. It is worth mentioning that users with an active subscription are not affected by the price increase, until the next renewal.

What about privacy? Is your data safe? Well, Microsoft says that it will not use your files, responses or prompts when you access Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps to train its AI models.

On a side note, the Redmond company has confirmed that Office and Microsoft 365 apps will not be supported on Windows 10, when the operating system reaches its end of life on October 14, 2025. That means users on Windows 10 will not get any feature and security updates for Office products. Ending support for Windows 10 is one thing, but denying support for a subscription that a user has paid for is really strange. It is unclear if the change affects OneDrive.

As a reminder, LibreOffice is free, open source, and a great alternative for Microsoft Office. It is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.