Excessive price increase

To all,

I've been on MS-365 Personal for sometime now here in the UK & have it set to 'recurring-billing' at £59.99 per year on my online account & renews at the end of April.

I thought I'd check my online account to review the billing. Sure enough, MS-HQ have set my new pricing at £84.99 & is now listed as current subscription & notes two new items to their MS-365 plans, these are:-

The Copilot tool built into the 365 Apps & the Designer App with AI functions.

I can't recall receiving any e-mail notifications from MS HQ stating this 'Hiked' increase will occur this coming April, however, as MS HQ are always updating their OS system & 365 subscriptions, I have noticed the Copilot functions now appear in my 365 Apps. I've not used the AI tools much, when I do, its mostly on a web-browser & not too sure I'll use the AI functions in the 365 Apps.

I can see if you click on the recurring billing on ones MS Internet account, I now get presented with three MS-365 versions:-

MS-365 Personal at £84.99 per/year, MS-365 Personal Classic at £59.99 per/year & MS-365 Basic at £19.99 per/year.

The MS-365 Personal Classic looks the same what I had before all these updates. These plans have a 'Switch-Plan' tab at the bottom of each plan, I'll probably swich back to my original plan, now called Classic.

MS-HQ though need to make the pricing more clear in my opinion, as I thought all these AI updates were part of my original MS-365 subscription, given its the same plan name. Regardless of the MS-365 plan names we have now, its more professional & business like if MS-HQ, put customers who were on the original MS-365 Personal, on the new Classic plan at the same price, rather than assuming we require these additional tools at the price increase !

Australian here.

This price increase is absolutely excessive

Disgusting behaviour by Microsoft who know full well they have the market power to do this - all to support pumping money into servers for AI computing and absolutely nothing to do with Office tools themselves.

They don't even allow you to share AI functions with Family members on the family plan. Only the Account owner/holder can use it.

Really Microsoft? You're charging that much and my family members can't even use ALL the functions?

I has saved me money. It game me the kick I needed to cancel 365. Now I feel liberated. There are really good alternatives out there. Libre office if pretty good these days. You could use a separate cloud storage if you need it, or look into Google one, it's cheaper. My only problem with Google is they make it very difficult to migrate your data onto personal storage which could be a problem if you change your mind in the future.

Me too. All I want is Word, Excel & Powerpoint. Dont use the cloud. Dont want AI or Copilot. Cant see any option in Australia to downgrade to classic, basic or anything cheaper. Understand the costs of developing these advanced features, but why do I have to pay such an unacceptable increase if I dont want or use these features?

I was in the same boat, i dont want or need any AI bloat in my Office Subscription.

I went into my MS Account Subscription for Office, hit Cancel Subscription, and well blow me down, there is the option to remain on the $109 a year plan with it called Microsoft365 Personal Classic or something like that, with no AI BS.

Up Yours Micro$oft