Publisher alternative in 2026

Sophia - we have used the excellent Publisher product and have 10 years worth of file copies of our monthly local magazine stored as Publisher files. What can we do?? Thank you ABC magazine team

No one wants AI! It's all big tech stealing from individuals.

For anyone that doesn't want the added copilot you can change your subscription in your account otherwise on renewal you will automatically be charged the higher subscription to include it. We have Microsoft 365 Family costing £79.99/year on renewal this was suddenly going to jump up to £104.99, I logged into my account and changed the subscription to Microsoft 365 Family Classic which will continue at £79.99. (does not include copilot)

This has left me in a real fix. I'm an amateur tabletop game designer, and I've put a lot of effort over the past few years into building assets for one of my game designs in Publisher. I can't really afford to pay for 365 and InDesign/Affinity/etc... I've tried Scribus which has a pretty horrible UX.

As far as I can see, none of these has a satisfactory way of converting/importing Publisher files. The export options for Publisher are clearly inadequate - Word is text-only, PDF loses all of the needed editability, and I don't see any other options. When I opened the .pub files in Scribus, it was clear it would be faster to just re-write the whole thing rather than try to correct all the formatting mess.

I'm now stuck with the prospect of having to spend weeks, maybe months, completely re-building all the asset files from scratch.

I'm a little confused by this information on their website

This conflicts with the email I received advising me to convert all my existing documents - this suggests it will still be available, someone help me out to understand this lol. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/publisher 
I make greeting cards and have many custom greeting card templates created in Publisher. I am struggling to recreate these in any alternative program I have looked at. I need to be able to have information on the back of the card with the front blank, a code on the back is edited before each print so converting to pdf really won't help me, although I have worked out I can add initials which can be my card code but my prints didn't seem to come out in quite the right place. I like to work on a single page aligning accurately which Publisher allows me to do. Can anyone recommend an alternative that would be as easy to create, I have looked into others but can't find anything that I see as a replacement, some I have looked at you have to create a page size the width of the card and guess where the middle is to add information on the back of the card which is ridiculous. I do have an older version of Office (MS Office Pro 2013) but it will not allow me to install whether that's because I already have 365 installed not sure. When we get to October 2026 I shall uninstall 365 and try installing again at that time, no point wasting time now plus I'm hopeful Microsoft will decide, whilst they won't update or offer in new subscriptions, they will allow us to continue to use the software.