Your Microsoft 365 subscription cost is going up for the first time in 12 years — but don't worry, it now includes a "monthly allotment" of Copilot

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Copilot is coming to Microsoft 365 Personal and Home subscriptions, but you'll be paying $3 more a month for it.

Copilot in Outlook
Copilot is now in Office apps under the Home and Personal subscriptions. (Image credit: Windows Central)

Microsoft has announced that it is increasing the price of its Microsoft 365 Personal and Home subscriptions for the first time in 12 years. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the price hike comes as Microsoft introduces Copilot to the Personal and Home subscription, allowing users to utilize Copilot in Office apps without the need of a Copilot Pro subscription.

The company says that each subscription will be going up by $3 in the United States, which now means you'll be paying $9.99 a month for Microsoft 365 Personal and $12.99 a month for Microsoft 365 Home. Microsoft says the price hike isn't because of Copilot, but the only new additions being added to the subscription today is Copilot and Microsoft Designer, so make of that what you will.

If you don't want Copilot in your Microsoft 365 subscription, the company is launching a "classic" sub tier for a limited time that will allow Home and Personal subscribers to "downgrade" to what the subscription was before without Copilot. This subscription won't be available forever, according to Microsoft.

If you're happy with the price hike and the introduction of Copilot in Office, here's what new experiences you can expect going forward:

  • Word: features Draft and Chat. Draft mode lets users generate text inside new or existing Word documents, formatted and presented based on criteria set out by the user. Chat mode acts as an AI assistant for the Word app, allowing users to ask Copilot questions about how to use Word, suggestions on what content to include in a particular document, and help with controlling features within the app. 
  • PowerPoint: features much of the same capabilities as it does in Word, including the ability to create a PowerPoint presentation from scratch based on criteria provided by the user. It can even analyze an existing Word document and create a presentation based off the information inside it. 
  • Excel: analyze tables and help show correlations, suggest new formulas based on questions asked by the user, and generate insights that help explore data in a spreadsheet. It can format and organize your data, create visualizations, or ask for general formula column suggestions based on your data.
  • OneNote: helps you draft ideas, plans, and organize information within your Notebooks. It can also format content and create lists based on criteria provided by the user. 
  • Outlook: can summarize emails from friends, family, and colleagues and draft a response based on a specific tone, length, and format specified by the user. Copilot can also pull information and data from other emails to provide context in an email thread, useful for when you are dealing with multiple email chains.

Even though the price is going up, Microsoft is only allowing a limited amount of Copilot usage under the Home and Personal subscriptions. These come in the form of monthly AI credits that will automatically be applied to your Microsoft account. If you want unlimited access to Copilot in Office, you'll need to subscribe to Copilot Pro, which is an additional $20 a month.

The company doesn't say how many AI credits will be allotted every month on the standard Home and Personal subscriptions.

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Zac Bowden
Zac Bowden
Senior Editor

Zac Bowden is a Senior Editor at Windows Central. Bringing you exclusive coverage into the world of Windows on PCs, tablets, phones, and more. Also an avid collector of rare Microsoft prototype devices! Keep in touch on Twitter and Threads

11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • GothardJ2
    Except if you follow the steps to downgrade to Microsoft 365 Classic, there is no option to sign up for Classic. The chat queue is at a 49-minute wait as of now because of this. Keeps being more and more difficult to stay a Microsoft fan.
    Reply
  • Davin Peterson
    Previously you had to buy the Copilot Al separately, now they bundled with the 365 subscription and raised the price
    Reply
  • chris9465
    Copilot does nothing for me. Am currently moving my online life, from Microsoft.

    Am going Apple am sick of MS BS WIN11 Pro is useless garbage that ruined my Pc gaming laptop.

    Am done with the horrible gaming environment from PC/Laptop to the xbox; your Refrigerator is an xbox campaign. Gamepass has destroyed the xbox brand. Windows as a service ruined my online experience it’s nothing but broken update after broken update. 24H2 is a ridiculous mess.

    Windows has never had security. Microsoft security is the equivalent of using scotch tape to secure your home. Sure it’s there but it isn’t stopping anyone from getting in.

    Microsoft has nothing going for it. It’s all bad all the time.
    Reply
  • GraniteStateColin
    chris9465 said:
    Copilot does nothing for me. Am currently moving my online life, from Microsoft.

    Am going Apple am sick of MS BS WIN11 Pro is useless garbage that ruined my Pc gaming laptop.

    Am done with the horrible gaming environment from PC/Laptop to the xbox; your Refrigerator is an xbox campaign. Gamepass has destroyed the xbox brand. Windows as a service ruined my online experience it’s nothing but broken update after broken update. 24H2 is a ridiculous mess.

    Windows has never had security. Microsoft security is the equivalent of using scotch tape to secure your home. Sure it’s there but it isn’t stopping anyone from getting in.

    Microsoft has nothing going for it. It’s all bad all the time.

    Something there doesn't make sense: If you gripe with MS has to do with gaming, you obviously wouldn't go to Apple, which has far less gaming support than MS. You'd go to Sony or Nintendo or Valve.

    On security, Apple has comparable security it many areas, better in some personal privacy areas, and less in others where MS has the most battle-tested overall security of all the tech companies.

    24H2 is a solid version of Windows for the VAST majority of users, especially if you only updated after Windows Update recommended it, rather than forced it manually before it was ready for your hardware. There are a bunch of known issues (including some gaming-specific issues), which sucks if you're affected by those, but these also happen to Mac OS, iOS, and Android users shortly following their updates. No update of any system is without some regression bugs.

    There are plenty of legit complaints to have with MS, but your post doesn't read like a post by a former MS fan who has had enough. It reads like an anti-MS post from the start.

    And Copilot is amazing if you're looking for information. I never search the Internet for answers to questions now. I still search for specific web pages and articles, but if I have a question and want a quick answer, I always just ask Copilot. It can do in seconds what would otherwise take minutes or hours of research to match. No idea yet if it will be helpful in Office (hasn't been to me so far), but it's far from useless.
    Reply
  • GraniteStateColin
    I wish MS would increase the amount of included OneDrive space to default to, say, 2TB instead of 1TB per person under the Office subscription. Surely in the years since their current pricing, cost of drive space has dropped enough to enable that. This would be a good time to do that too, then it also wouldn't look like it's Copilot's "fault" that the price is going up.
    Reply
  • nop
    $3 more a month for MS 365 Copilot , color me pleased !
    Reply
  • Laura Knotek
    I have no use for Copilot. It's a waste of money for me. I already have 2 TB Google Drive, so I'll cancel Microsoft 365 when my subscription ends. I don't use anything except OneDrive now.
    Reply
  • DaveDansey
    I've never felt compelled to pay a monthly fee for Office or cloud storage. I manage just fine with a perpetual licensed copy of office and physical drives (of which I have backups of important things; namely all the photos and videos I've ever taken, in multiple locations).

    I do wonder if I'll ever feel the need to succumb and pay continually for these sorts of things. I sincerely hope not.
    Reply
  • ad47uk
    DaveDansey said:
    I've never felt compelled to pay a monthly fee for Office or cloud storage. I manage just fine with a perpetual licensed copy of office and physical drives (of which I have backups of important things; namely all the photos and videos I've ever taken, in multiple locations).

    I do wonder if I'll ever feel the need to succumb and pay continually for these sorts of things. I sincerely hope not.
    Nor me, even with all the years I was using Windows on my main computer. But I am sure businesses find a good reason to. The majority of home users would have little use even for Office to be honest, with so many free suites around that unless they really need 100% office compatibility will do for most home users.

    If you want cloud storage then the MS prices are very good, for me in the U.K, if I wanted cloud storage, for £8.49 a month or less if I pay yearly, I would get 1TB of cloud storage and then the use of all the MS Office apps locally. Dropbox is £9.99, less if billed yearly for 2TB of storage and that is it, nothing else.

    Google is £8 for 2TB and yes you can use the online stuff, like Google Docs, but you can do that for free anyway.
    So yes, MS online stuff is pretty good value of money, if you are going to use it,

    Myself, like you I have no need for it, on my PC, I use LibreOffice, not that I use the PC that often these days, on my Mac, Apple Pages and numbers do what I need and for desktop publishing I use Affinity publisher, but then MS have done away with their publishing software. Storage I have my nas and I save anything important onto external drives or even, yes I know it is old, but it is secure, Blueray disks
    Reply
  • Rhubarbed WireSloth
    Davin Peterson said:
    Previously you had to buy the Copilot Al separately, now they bundled with the 365 subscription and raised the price
    Because no one would buy it as a separate product.

    Why is that? Because any AI is only as good as the people programming it, and only as right as the information it accesses or is allowed to access, and only as smart as it is allowed to be. It cannot make decisions that are smarter than human inputs, despite being able to sort through millions of facts faster, because it has no sense of what we
    used to call "conscience". Itself, AI states it has no opinions, but it fails to notice that this
    itself is a limitation.

    If you think about it, no civilization, no university, no high school really "produces" results that are smarter than average. The few times real geniuses came to be, that is the exception that proves the rule. Same with families: Very few kids turn out smarter than their parents, and in this environment, with poisoned foods, plants, water, lakes, chemical overloads, most kids are turning out dumber. Look at the various concepts of news, internet, fights and arguments over nothing, and tell me that I am still wrong.

    Think: You probably know a few people in the software world. Ask yourself: Are these people at all capable or outstanding in the fields of law, medicine, history, philosophy, biology, chemistry, physics, linguistics, literature, art, psychology, sociology, botany, music?
    I don't think they are. I am sad to announce that they are, on average, a very narrow-minded bunch. How can they make AI smarter than themselves? Yes, AI is faster in sorting things, and faster in trying to but things together that were not tried before by humans, but it cannot be the final arbiter over whether the result is useful or not, better, worse or not , with untold consequences or not. For that we still need humans, and if those humans lack a conscience, then things could get complicated. In a way, don't ask AI to be doing what you as a human being ought to be responsible for. If you don't know that, you don't know enough. You can come to this conclusion both from a philosophical or religious point of view, but only if you care enough about others compared to yourself,

    If you wonder why I am leaving out Political Science and religion from the above list of sciences, that's because these are fields very much corrupted by unwillingness to change, to reason, to consider others ideas at all. And they are all so open to manipulate, coerce, subdue, punish, harass, tax, push, rule by fear, rule by getting believers to hate others, and so forth. These "sciences of manipulation and false promises" need to be treated separately and kept in check, as much as is peaceably possible. You can see why I find it odd that some software types are calling themselves "evangelists" of one software or another. It's a bit like: "Give me a sign!"
    Reply