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.
