MicroSoft 365 Home is increasing by 30% in 2025?

Presumably the business thinking behind making people downgrade to a monthly subscription is to allow Microsoft freedom from a rush of annual renewals before the price rise for all "in about a year", thereby ensuring subscribers who currently choose not to have "Copilot" are forced into paying the higher rate earlier than otherwise?

Note that many of us do not need or welcome such assistance from "Copilot".

To be clear, it's a 43% price increase.

And for the 99% that don't care about AI in a product designed for home use, it would have been nice to at least have the OneDrive bumped up to 1.5 or 2 TB. Then we'd at least feel like we are getting some extra benefit to make up for the enormous price increase.

Yes, it's a general price increase with the enforced addition of AI being used to justify it. And this is not a feature that I'd imagine most users would even want or use.

Thank goodness it's possible to opt for the classic version of the subscription in order to decline the addition of AI. However, this option is hidden away as thoroughly as it could have been. Rather than being presented as a choice in the subscription management area where it ought to be, and where you'd expect to find it, Microsoft hides it away beyond the cancellation option, so you have to cancel your current subscription before you even see it presented. This is very deceptive behaviour.

Even when you do cancel your existing plan and resubscribe on the AI-free classic version, you find that it now costs around 15% more(*) than it did previously, which is unwelcome. I'm not at all happy about this.

(*I think. I can't actually even find the price of the classic subscription again, now that I've set it up. I think it's about a £10 increase over the existing £60, but it may be more.)

Didn't ask for Co-pilot and has no use for it.

Microsoft justifies this by including Copilot AI in all plans, but they never clearly informed users that a non-AI “Classic” version exists for $30 less per year. Instead of making it easy to switch, they force users to cancel their subscription and manually resubscribe, which feels like an unnecessary barrier to opting out of AI.

On top of that, Microsoft says the Classic plan is only available for a “limited time”, meaning we may eventually be forced into AI integration, whether we want it or not. This approach lacks transparency and gives users little real choice—why not offer Copilot as an optional add-on instead of bundling it into all plans and increasing prices?

Frankly, I find this unethical. I don’t need Copilot. I’m tired of every company forcing AI into everything. Microsoft was late to the AI game, and now they’re pushing it aggressively at our expense. First, they took away our PCs with their bloated post Windows 7 OS updates, and now they’re taking subscription control away from users.

This is getting out of hand.