For those of us that use Microsoft Office 365 package the old price was very reasonable at £79 (UK price inc Vat) In February 2025 Microsoft have increased the cost from £79 to £104.99 which is a price increase of 32.89%.
The price increase affects all subscription based users on the either the family (best all round package) and the personal package. It looks like the increase came into force late last year (Oct 2024). My email alert popped in my inbox yesterday for my renewal in late February.
The 2 questions you have to ask about the product are:
- Can I still afford it ?
- Is it still worth the yearly subscription payment?
To help answer the question the options are continue with package or move to the one off licence version for your devices (£119.99 Office Home 2024) . Looking at the family package it does allow 1TB of storage and 6 users to use the software of 5 devices. Where as if your not utilised the cloud storage and or the 6 users then the one off payment might be the way to move forward as its a one off payment which would tide you over for several years of updates.
For those of us who do not upgrade our Mac OS that much then the latter is not a bad option and you wont run into the software update issue 365 has for legacy machines mentioned in the Office 365 article .
Going down the road of paying the one off payment of Office 2024 to then install on a legacy OS like Monterey you may find you are unable to register older version of office using the legacy version links from Microsoft website. With 365 family version it seems to register the software licence for that Operating System even if it’s a legacy version. In short watch out 2024 one off payment of Office may not work on legacy Mac Operating system.
One Final option would be to look to purchase a discounted version of Microsoft 365 Family from Amazon, Argos or Currys to name a few UK based companies. I have found in the past they always have a deal on wether it buy 15 months for thew price of 12 months or the 12 month package at a significantly cheaper price than Microsoft. Top Tip if you do buy from them mark your calendar to alert you when the renewal date is up so you don’t end up buying the package at full price from Microsoft.
To find the deals use the string search “office 365 family” in your search engine or direct from Amazon and see what comes up in your area. Obviously each location the deals will vary.