Online Accounts 2025: Saying No to Renting Software ⭐

I wish I could say that I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. But I’m just tired of it all. Tired of the enshittification, tired of the products and services that I rely on getting worse and worse, and more expensive, over time. But most of all, I’m tired of paying again and again for products and services that I either don’t use at all, don’t use enough, or are just too expensive when viable alternatives exist. And so a big focus of this coming year will be scaling back on all that whenever and wherever possible.

The solution to this kind of problem typically takes the form of Little Tech companies and solutions. There are no good options in the hardware space thanks to the strangleholds that Apple and Google have in mobile and Microsoft and Apple have with computers. Here, one can simply use these platforms for what they are and ignore upsells where possible. And there are specific solutions, like Tiny11Builder, that can nicely de-enshittify OS platforms, in this case Windows. But you may lean more into a Mac or even Linux if you’re adventurous enough.

How we got here

I can’t even recall what my outlook was like as 2025 began, but at the end of January, Google unceremoniously cut me off from the Thurrott.com YouTube account, triggering some major rethinking of my relationships with Big Tech and technology in general that continues to this day. And with 2025 now drawing to a close, it is clear to me that I have become somewhat radicalized by what I see in this industry and how the changes that have been thrust on us–enshittification, basically–are almost universally negative.

There’s the obvious, like ever-increasing prices on services that used to be so inexpensive that they were no brainers. There’s the subtle, like the subscription creep that led to higher and higher overall costs each month. There’s AI, of course, which Big Tech sees as a chance to not just charge us even more but to charge us almost exponentially more. There are financial shenanigans that might be described as a pyramid scheme if they were only that simple. And there are the overt money grabs as best exemplified by Apple’s disgusting 30 percent app store fees and $20+ billion in silent payoffs from Google for Search placement.

This industry sucks.

And I’m a part of it. A small part, to be sure, but with an obligation as an individual with empathy for others and, more to the point, a (small) soapbox that I use to the benefit of consumers, or users, and not the companies that should be serving them but are, instead, using them. We’re like the human bodies powering the Machines in The Matrix movies, helpless victims stewing in our own filth while being fooled into believing that our existence is somehow meaningful. Only an unthinking, morally bankrupt cad would defend Big Tech. But some do.

I try to be more clear-headed, but with the usual mixed success. And I certainly don’t have the meme-generating skills of a Cory Doctorow. But I have long discussed how we have relationships with companies or the products and services they offer. And before the term enshittification forever changed our perception of this dynamic, I noted that these relationships could be healthy, in that both sides derive some value, or, as is so often the case these days, toxic. Our relationships with Big Tech turn toxic because of enshittification, of course, through higher prices and less derived value.

In August 2024, I wrote that I will not pay for AI, though I feel like it was misunderstood by some. What I meant was that AI, as promoted by Big Tech and aspiring Big Tech companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, is not a unit of purchase (a thing to pay for) but rather a growing set of features for the apps and services that we do use and may pay for. This is as true today as it was a year ago. And if you look at the agentic AI pushes in web browsers new (Dia, Comet, Atlas) and old (Chrome, Edge), you can see how this thinking of AI as a dividing line between free and paid is infecting more and more of the software we rely on.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella addressed this very point in Microsoft’s recent post-earnings conference call. But as the CEO of one of the world’s richest and most powerful companies, it’s fair to say he is approaching this from a completely different direction than I am. His goal isn’t customer value, it’s shareholder value.

“One of the things I like about Copilot is, I mean, Copilot ARPUs [average revenue per user] compared to Microsoft 365 ARPUs, it’s expansive,” he said during his opening remarks on the call. “[It’s] the same thing that happened between server and cloud, we used to always say, ‘Well, is it zero sum?’ It turned out that the cloud was so much more expansive to the server market. The same thing is happening in AI, because first, you could say, hey, our ARPUs are too low when it comes to Microsoft 365, or you could say, we have the opportunity with AI to be much more expansive.”

No one ever accused Microsoft 365 of not being expensive enough. But the past two years have seen price hikes, new premium subscription tiers, and other changes. Money grabs from a company that has more money than it knows what to do with.

It’s not just Microsoft, of course. Adobe Photoshop and other Creative Cloud products are all rental-only now. And even Photoshop and Premiere Elements are now basically subscriptions since these once “perpetual” products are now licensed and supported for only three years. So the cost of each is actually about $33 per user per year, with the added benefit of you not being able to pay per year: Instead, you pay $100 upfront, at least once every three years.

This past summer, I summarized my feelings about the high-quality Big Tech alternatives in Little Tech (Premium) by listing the companies, software, and services that I trust, use, and/or can recommend to others. These are solutions that buck the trends we see in Big Tech, and it’s a list that will hopefully on grow in time. No doubt, we will see some missteps, too, some Little Tech companies that get lost in a mad dash for profits.

So being vigilant is key, paying attention. How far one is willing or able to go in removing Big Tech from our lives is up to the individual, and beholden to circumstance. I am not calling for a boycott, or whatever, of Big Tech, do not believe for even a second that me or anyone else “voting with my wallet” will in any way impact any of these Big Tech companies. That’s a fool’s errand. We do what we do for ourselves, and we do it selfishly. That’s all this is: Doing what’s right for you. Me refusing to pay for Microsoft 365 or Xbox Game Pass or whatever else isn’t going to hurt Microsoft, and I will not be inspired by the possibility that it might. Instead, I will make decisions that benefit me and my loved ones, and I will do so with an explicit tunnel vision because that is all that matters to me.

This thinking can and should be applied everywhere. But let’s start with the highest value target of them all in our community. That thing that used to be called Microsoft Office.

Microsoft 365: From no-brainer to just no

There was a time when I referred to Microsoft 365–originally, Office 365–as a no-brainer. In its consumer versions, at least, it was the perfect combination of the productivity apps that everyone wanted, a lot of cloud storage, and reasonable pricing. To be clear, each of those attributes played a role, and it was the sum of those attributes that put these offerings–Microsoft 365 Personal and Microsoft 365, at the time, over the top. This service delivered great value.

Microsoft 365 vs. Microsoft Office

It’s sometimes too easy to be cynical. But the enshittification inherent in Microsoft 365 was present from the very beginning, and in this case, I might have been better prepared had I embraced my inner cynicism as this transition unfolded. Yes, Microsoft continued to offer standalone Office suites, and it promised to keep producing them as long as the market demanded it. But these standalone suites, called perpetual licenses in Microsoft-speak, were always second rate compared to the subscriptions that customers paid for every month. And the terms only got worse over time.

One installation vs. an essentially infinite number of installations. A standalone Office version can be installed on just a single computer, so you don’t get the liberal installation rights afforded to those who pay for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family: With those subscriptions, each user can install the Office suite (or, on mobile, individual Office apps) on an unlimited number of PCs, Macs, phones, and tablets, and use them on five devices simultaneously.

No more upgrades, no more upgrade pricing. There are no longer upgrade versions of Microsoft Office, so each purchase is one and done: You have one instance of Office running on a single PC or Mac, and that’s it. When a new version appears, you have to buy it all over again, at full price, with no upgrade pricing. Don’t believe the “lifetime” purchase aspect of this software, it’s only supported for five years, down from 10 years in the past.

No more new features. But it’s not just the shortened support lifecycle. The standalone Office apps are never updated with new features. Only those who pay for a subscription get new features, and those features appear every single month across all the platforms on which Microsoft 365 and its many apps and services run. (That this may be a good thing is another discussion. But we’ll get to that.)

No cloud storage, no more storage-only subscriptions. Those who buy a standalone Office suite do not get any additional OneDrive cloud storage with that purchase. So you’re stuck with the base storage, just 5 GB. You used to be able to pay OneDrive for more storage, but now that’s being folded into Microsoft 365 as well, with a Microsoft 365 Basic offering that provides just 100 GB of additional storage with none of the other Microsoft 355 benefits. If you need more than that, and you do, you have to pay for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family. And if you need more than the 1 TB of storage each user gets with those subscriptions, you can pay extra for more storage beyond that. A lot more, but you have to have that core subscription first.

There’s more to it, but those are the key high-level differences. So let’s look at the costs.

A Microsoft 365 Family subscription costs $129.99 per year in the U.S. if you pay annually, and it provides all the benefits noted above (plus others) to 6 people.

A standalone Office Home 2024 purchase costs $149.99. It can only be installed on a single computer, can only be used by one person, and only includes “classic” versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote (the latter of which is free, regardless) that are frozen in time and never functionally updated. A standalone Office Home & Business 2024 purchase costs $249.99, almost exactly double the price of Microsoft 365 Family. It comes with everything in Office Home 2024, including all the limitations, but adds the Outlook app and it’s licensed for commercial use if that matters to you. (It shouldn’t.)

From a financial perspective, standalone Office just doesn’t make sense. That’s by design, as Microsoft is pushing us to get used to always paying for subscriptions. But that’s also the math. It’s why so many moved onto to whatever Microsoft 365 subscription. Like I said, it was a no-brainer.

The problem, of course, is that Microsoft 365 got worse over time, too. The vice keeps tightening.

The base subscriptions got more expensive, but to be fair, not dramatically so, and not repeatedly on a regular basis. Microsoft 365 Personal started off at $69.99 per year and it now costs $99.99 per year. Microsoft 365 Family started off at $99.99 per year and is now $129.99 per year. (These prices assume you pay annually. Each is more expensive if you pay monthly; roughly $120 and $156 per year, respectively.)

The grenade in the room

But those are just direct costs. In addition to killing its OneDrive extra storage plans and instead tying higher storage tiers to Microsoft 365 subscriptions, Microsoft pulled a fast one starting in early 2024 when it introduced something called Copilot Pro. This was described as a “premium subscription,” which was a double-whammy of word play in that it cost $20 per user per month, over twice the cost of Microsoft 365 Family, an offering that covers six users, and it required you to also pay for a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription too. (Copilot Pro was the consumer version of Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is even more expensive.)

Copilot Pro was all about AI functionality, largely via integration in key Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook. But aside from the obvious, the problem with Copilot Pro was that those additional features–which, admittedly, I did like in early testing–were exactly the types of features that Microsoft used to add to Microsoft 365 “for free,” meaning as part of the subscription you were already paying for. That is, one of the main benefits of Microsoft 365 Family or Personal compared to a standalone Office suite was now being usurped, or turned on its head. Instead of two tiers, there were three: Standalone Office suites with no new features, Microsoft 365 Family and Personal subscriptions with some new features, and Microsoft 365 Family or Personal with Copilot Pro, each more expensive than the last. Much more expensive in the latter case.

The even bigger grenade in the room

Copilot Pro flopped, so Microsoft hit the reset switch in 2025 by replacing it with a true third tier of subscriptions called Microsoft 365 Premium. This offering is $19.99 per month or $199.99 per year and it’s almost a superset to Microsoft 365 Family in that it, too, provides all the same basic perks as that subscription while adding the Copilot-based features that were previously exclusive to Copilot Pro. If you weren’t paying attention, you might have fallen for this trap, but Microsoft 365 Premium is an even worse deal than Copilot Pro for families that have two or more individuals who wish to use Copilot and AI. And to understand why, we have to read some fine print and do some math.

As an individual, the cheapest way for you to get all those Copilot features was to pay for Microsoft 365 Personal at $99.99 per year, plus Copilot Pro at $19.99 per month, for a total cost of about $340 per year. Or, you could pay for Microsoft 365 Family, extending that subscription’s benefits to five more people for $129.99 per year; then, each member that wanted Copilot Pro could pay an additional $19.99 per month for Copilot Pro. If you had two users who did so, the annual cost was about $610.

Now, Copilot Pro is gone and Microsoft 365 Premium is $199.99 per year. So it’s less expensive for an individual who was previously paying for Microsoft 365 Personal and Copilot Pro. But the problem with Microsoft 365 Premium is two-fold. First, though it’s a family subscription with support for 6 users, the Copilot-based AI capabilities are only available to the account holder, meaning the person who is paying for Microsoft 365 Premium. So if you have two or more people in that subscription, only one of them, the account holder, gets all the new AI features. And second, there is now no way for the other people to pay extra to get those AI features, as was the case with Copilot Pro. Now, everyone has to pay for their own Premium subscription to get those features.

Put another way, the base Copilot Pro subscription used to be a bit more than $28 per user per month (at the least) if you paid for Microsoft 365 Personal because $99.99 divided by 12 is $8.35 and that plus the $19.99 per month Copilot fee is a bit over $28 per month. But now, there’s no other way for an individual to pay for those Copilot AI capabilities. The base cost is now $19.99 per month, but that’s per user. If you have two family members who want that, then the total cost is now $39.98 per month if you pay monthly or $33.33 per month if you pay annually: There is no Personal tier with all the AI functionality. There are no workarounds. Just price increases if there are two or more people who want this stuff.

Well, there is one workaround: You could pay less and get less, in this case, lower limits on AI features and no access to the AI features that are exclusive to Microsoft 365 Premium. And the cheapest way for two people to do that is to get two Microsoft 365 Personal subscriptions at $198.98 per year, which works out to $16.67 per month. So the insidious nature of this pricing is that Microsoft 365 Premium is only $3 more per month. You should upgrade!

As a friend from high school used to say, that’s how they get you. As Cory Doctorow now says, that’s just one of many ways in which this product has become enshittified. As we know, enshittification is a form of platform decline in which once valuable (one might say, “no-brainer”) platforms like Microsoft Office reallocate their value over time, pushing it away from locked in, paying customers. More specifically, the regular shift in value over time is a form of “twiddling” in which Microsoft extracts more from us financially in a way that we sometimes don’t notice at first.

In this case, we all noticed. Microsoft is moving quickly when it comes to figuring out and implementing its AI strategy, but it’s also happening in real time, and we live in this world. So we all noticed, but the question becomes, which of us had enough of this nonsense? When does it become too much?

Good news, we have a grenade of our own

Before moving on, it’s worth discussing what it is that we can do, as consumers, to address the potential problems with Microsoft’s strategy in the office productivity space. That is, instead of paying every single month for a subscription whose value may or may not be there, does it make sense to simply pay for standalone Office suites? Or perhaps move to a free or less expensive alternative?

That will depend on your situation. I still maintain a Microsoft 365 Family subscription for the OneDrive storage–it’s a part of my backup/archiving strategy–and because my family literally still uses some subset of the Office apps regularly. That I do not do: I use Typora or another Markdown editor for writing, Notion for just about everything else productivity related, and I never need any of the Office apps. But free alternatives like LibreOffice will do the job nicely for many, including, go figure, Cory Doctorow.

Here’s a caveat I should own up to as well. I am not paying full price for Microsoft 365 Family. In fact, I don’t think I ever have. Thanks to several friends, each a former or current Microsoft employee, I’ve often participated in annual buying sprees through the Microsoft Friends & Family program. And so I have racked up years worth of Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions that I stack in my Microsoft account. Instead of paying $129.99 per year, I pay $26 per year, and the cost used to be even less. I do likewise for Microsoft 365 Business Standard ($30 per year) and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate ($180 per year). All these subscriptions are paid out for several years and I have codes to activate 3 to 5 more years of each.

So, yay me: I am paying for these subscriptions like a hypocrite, but at drastically reduced rates. But this hasn’t colored my views of these subscriptions and how they’ve changed for the worse. And to be perfectly clear, I would not pay full price for any of them. Not one.

But that’s just me. Maybe you literally do need Microsoft Office for whatever reasons. In that case, you can shop for sales on Microsoft 365 product keys, which are now available digitally. You can get a year of Microsoft 365 Personal for $59.99 right now on Amazon.com, though Microsoft 365 Family is full price.

Or, if you don’t need the OneDrive storage, only have a handful of PCs, and so on, you can simply buy a standalone Office suite via a product key and a download. No, not at the full retail prices noted above, that’s insane. But at much cheaper prices by choosing one of the many online retailers that offer such a thing.

I know. I know this is controversial for some reason. It shouldn’t be: As I often point out, if this were illegal, Microsoft would put a stop to it. And I’ve used these product keys many, many times without any issue at all. And what’s the risk? You’re not spending $149.99, $249.99, or whatever terrible price. You’re spending much less.

How much less? Looking quickly at just one of these sites, called Productkeys.com, I can see that all the standalone Office suites are less expensive, some dramatically so. Office 2024 Home is $111, which isn’t terrific, and I don’t even see the latest Home & Office version. But you can get Office 2024 Standard, the equivalent of Home & Office, for just $14.90. And Office 2024 Professional Plus, which adds Access, is $19.90.

At those prices, you could consider cheaper cloud storage if you need it–Google delivers twice the storage of OneDrive for the same price, for example, and you can “self host” with a NAS as I’m doing if you feel up to it–or just work locally and back up. You have choices, and those choices expand when you stop paying so much for things you don’t need.