Opting Out of Microsoft 365’s Copilot AI
Nick Gelling (via Hacker News, Reddit):
If you have a Microsoft 365 subscription, you might’ve been told your fees are going up by $5 a month or $50 a year. But the fees aren’t actually changing – you’re just being upsold.
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On face value, a price hike of around 30–40% for a half-hearted implementation of an AI tool seems like a bad deal – at least for some of the tens of thousands of 365 subscribers in Aotearoa.
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Log into your Microsoft account at account.microsoft.com. Find your 365 subscription and select “Manage”. Then select “Cancel subscription”.
If you have the right kind of subscription, a new option will miraculously appear – Microsoft 365 Classic, which has no price increase or Copilot AI.
Just like with Adobe, this did not work for me. After I cancelled my $69.99 subscription, the only alternatives were more expensive plans. After over an hour of chat support, I was told that you cannot switch to the Classic plan until it’s time to renew the current plan, even though Microsoft’s own forum had recommended the same thing as Gelling. Maybe too many people were downgrading—the support person seemed prepared to argue with me that I really do want Copilot AI.
The other dark pattern I noticed is that the new plan is $99.99/year or $9.99/month, and it claims that the former is a savings of 41%.
Previously:
- Adobe Raises Monthly Photography Plan Prices
- Privacy of Windows Copilot+ Recall
- Windows Copilot+ AI Features
- Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs
- Microsoft 365 Copilot
Update (2025-01-30): Ed Bott (Hacker News):
As far as I can tell, the response from customers has been overwhelmingly negative. I monitor Microsoft-focused online forums obsessively, and I read hundreds of complaints without seeing a single compliment. Seriously, the reaction to this rollout was an Excel #DIV/0 error.
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I’m paying Microsoft for not one but two subscriptions, and they raised the price of one of those subscriptions while not allowing me to use its signature feature. That seems like a lousy way to reward your best customers.
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Seriously, the support page that explains where you can find that box in Word says, “We’re working on adding the Enable Copilot checkbox to Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint on Windows devices and to Excel and PowerPoint on Mac devices. That is tentatively scheduled to happen in February 2025.” Until the Enable Copilot button is available, you can’t disable Copilot.
Google and Microsoft have both bundled AI tools into their office suites then raised the price. This implies either that customer demand for the standalone AI offering was not enough so they made it mandatory or the AI tools are so useful they think people will happily accept the price increase once they try them.
Which do you think it is? 🤔
12 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
There’s no way I’m paying $100/yr for Microsoft Office. If they kill my $70/yr plan, I’ll be dumping it. The AI stuff should be an opt-in upgrade. I would guess that the majority of people don’t need or care about it.
FWIW, Costco sells a 15 month family subscription (6 users) for $130, with a $10 Visa eGift Card rebate, for an effective price of $120 for 15 months or $8/mo. Which is better than MSRP (what you get from Microsoft and Amazon) for a single-user subscription.
Sadly, this still includes Copilot. If you can buy a Classic subscription code, Costco doesn't sell it.
You know your products are good when you continually have to trick people into using or paying for them.
Thanks for writing about this. I had no clue they were doing this. I followed your advise and changed to 'classic'
@Sander Van Dragt: if someone is a serious spreadsheet user, nothing else is really a good substitute.
LibreOffice is janky and Google Sheets feels like a webapp.
> The other dark pattern I noticed is that the new plan is $99.99/year or $9.99/month, and it claims that the former is a savings of 41%.
They used Copilot to do the math.
I just went in to manage my plan. I didn't see a classic plan on offer. They offered me a 69.99/yr option, converting to $99 a year (with AI) next year. I took that, then immediately went to cancel recurring billing. THAT is where they offered me the "classic" plan, which will renew next year at $69.99 without AI. Convoluted, but that got it done for me.
"if someone is a serious spreadsheet user"
...they should be learning Python (or whatever the correct thing is to solve their issue, which is never Excel). They're clearly smart enough, but they're using a tool that's not fit for purpose.
@Plume: I mean, yes, they probably should be learning Python. Excel is actually a much better tool for a lot of use cases.
By serious spreadsheet user, I'm more talking about power users, not people building models in it.
If you are doing modeling, yeah, you should absolutely be learning Python or other appropriate tools, but if you are an accountant or another person in financial services, there really isn't a need for most.
Thanks for saving me $30/year!
@Plume: I know Python and spreadsheets are great at a lot of things that Python is too heavyweight for. Interestingly, Soulver is great at a lot of things that even spreadsheets are too heavyweight for.
