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.
[…]
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.
[…]
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
- Windows Copilot+ AI Features
- Microsoft’s Copilot+ PCs
- Microsoft 365 Copilot
3 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.
