You don't have to pay the Microsoft 365 price increase

We use so many SaaS I'm not sure it's worth resisting anymore.

Microsoft 365. Can't exit because: it's our SSO provider, also it's cost competitive with all the other email providers and you can't self-hosted email because sender reputation is too important in business.

Job tracking system. Can't exit because: it integrates with our cloud accounting software and getting that to link up with anything self-hosted is virtually impossible.

Freshdesk. Can't exit because: we could get off the ticketing system, but the knowledge base is hosted here as well, and that's publicly accessible.

Miro. Can't exit because: needs to be cloud hosted to share boards with customers, probably not worth hosting it considering costs involved and feature gaps with open source version.

This probably costs us like $2-3,000/yr per employee, sure, but wages are like 50x that these days. On the business continuity side of things using a bunch of SaaS does make me nervous, but if you have to have to rely on APIs connecting everything and throwing SSO around the place, can you really escape being held hostage to it all?

I think what it would take to escape SaaS is to go back to paper filing, and I think that would be more expensive than the money saved by the cross-integration of SaaS, for example manually copying bank lines from statements from several banks would take a good part of a day. Manually distributing copies of documents around the office would mean we get less work done. Manually backing-up everything probably costs more in external hard drives and time than it saves in SaaS fees.

I write this while holding back tears (:/) that things have come to it.

Imagine plumbers charged hundreds a month for toilets, came in once a year to rip out perfectly functional ones to put in new ones, and told you that it's a deal because of "value add".

Seriously, I don't know how we let software pull the wool over our eyes.

> I feel that convincing people to pay monthly/yearly for something that has minimal monthly recurring expenditure/investment from the provider (unlike utilities, streaming services, etc.) is one of the biggest cons of the modern era.

True, but it's not completely new. Decades ago I tried to buy my first car, and the salesperson told me how much it would cost me per month. I asked for the total cost, the interest rate, and even the number of months, and he had no idea about any of those things. I left and bought elsewhere, but I'm fairly careful with money and am always looking for the lowest total cost.

Salespeople seem to have learned that many people think in terms of monthly budgets rather than total costs. For them, this monthly billing is a "service". People don't have to think or do math. Of course it costs them money and makes the seller money, but it keeps their budgets even and predictable.

Sadly many corporations have adopted bureaucratic policies around budgets, purchase justifications, and approvals. At those companies, even though purchasing permanent licenses would save the company money, signing up for monthly services requires less bureacracy and keeps costs predictable. You and I can agree that it's ridiculous and wasteful, but many companies seem to prefer it that way.

>I have Office 2010 on an old computer. While it lacks some modern features of Microsoft 365 (for example, Office 2010 is much, much faster), it still works seamlessly with any files I create in 365. And I only had to pay, once, about the same amount that Microsoft is charging for a year's use of the same suite in the present day.

You really shouldn't be running an unpatched office suite. While it's not as dangerous as running an unpatched browser, there are occasional 1-click RCEs that show up that means opening any sort of untrusted docx/xlsx file is like playing russian roulette.

https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide filter for "office"

I've long felt that consumer acceptance of this pricing correlates with whether the subscription has a cost-of-good-sold component.

Desktop software does not impact COGS, and people near universally hate subscriptions for desktop software. File storage obviously has a COGS impact for the physical drives, and no one questions Dropbox/etc charging for their cloud storage (even if the price is an order of magnitude disconnected). Notably, customer support is not usually considered part of COGS, and doesn't scale in exactly the same way as the general variable costs associated with delivering a service.

Dropbox’s 2TB plan is $120. Office 365 is $129 with 1TB each for 6 users.

You can still buy Office 2024 as a proper app without any of that cloud stuff if you want to.

> So they throw in a few gigs of OneDrive to supposedly justify the cost?

OneDrive Family plan is still the cheapest and largest cloud storage (6TB of cloud storage for $99/year).

One catch though is that this can only be installed on a single PC (and there's online activation, so it will actually check). So if you have a desktop and a laptop, you'll have to pay double, whereas subscription covers up to 5 devices, if I remember correctly.

Does this have the crippled version of AutoSave that only works with OneDrive?

> For non-commercial use

What the hell

Thanks for linking it! Looks like it is just a license for a single machine. So that still hurts :/

Are you kidding me? For $46 a month, I am getting 57+ features / products. Let's list some major ones.

Exchange online with 100GB mailbox. Onedrive with 1TB storage Sharepoint with 1TB storage allocation as I am 1 user Full desktop office applications Full browser office applications Forms - so basically functional enough SurveyMonkey Teams Planner Bookings, so Calendly... Anti-virus MDM MAM Windows 10/11 Enterprise AAD, a full identity provider with MFA, SCIM, Federation, support for 1000s of integrations A ton of security and audit features to go with all of this.

There is nothing even close to this... adobe costs $30/mo. to edit PDFs with SSO...

It depends. If you need basic word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and email, you can definitely get by with alternatives. If you want more advanced functionality, you’re more likely to run into limitations or just things that work differently than what you might be used to. Microsoft 365 is not better in every way, but it’s a strong contender.

I suspect the familiarity and compatibility probably cinches it for a lot of people. Honestly, the convenience and familiarity are valuable, even if you and I would prefer open source options were more popular.

Microsoft 365 is good value, and it comes with many services. I wouldn’t have a personal license but it makes a lot of sense at work if you don’t mind sharing your data with USA.

Today's microsoft is exactly what yesterday's microsoft always wanted to be; software subscriptions have been the goal for decades.

I think the big tech companies have set standards so low that's it's often easy to look good by comparison. By the standards of big tech this is pretty small potstoes as egregious cash grabs go

"Trivial personal users moved to free alternatives ages ago"

Of all the things that didn't happen, this didn't happen the most.

My use case: for 100$/year, I can provide my family and my parents plenty of reliable cloud storage for their documents and pictures. With office suite thrown in as added bonus. I know of no other alternative that would provide equivalent of 6x1TB for such a low price.

Nobody moved to free alternatives. All the normies pay for Office. The cheapskates pirate it. The whole world runs on Office.

M365 Personal or Family can actually have a place as cost-effective cloud storage that 'just works' for consumers that don't care to go down the self hosting rabbit hole. It happens to include an office apps suite, but even without that it's extremely price competitive with other consumer-focused cloud storage. For $6-7/month you get 1TB of online storage, or for $8.25-10/month you get up to 6TB. Their competition (Apple, Google, Dropbox) pretty much all start at $10/mo for 2TB, possibly with paying for a year in advance.

The business plans are a different matter, but can make sense particularly if you're actually paying salary/wages for someone to maintain and support a self-hosted alternative.

For $129 a year I get:

- Office apps for all of my devices - Macs, Windows, iPhone, iPad and web

- 1 TB of cloud storage

And then I get both each for up to 6 users.

Dropbox’s 2TB storage plan by itself is $120 a year.

GSuite is okay and it’s our corporate standard. But it is nowhere near as good as Office

UK Colleges and schools use MS, so students don't have much choice.

Some UK government stuff appears to be MS only, which really is awful. Of course it's Microsoft's "open" formats; so you can use FOSS alternatives but MS will screw up the formatting.

Where can I get the free 1TB cloud storage with versioning/delete protection?

Enjoy your featureless spam bucket.

TS, GitHub, VSCode and ChatGPT are going to make the EEE days look bush league. There's an entire new generation of programmers that have a visceral hatred for doing any unassisted programming or writing a single line of code they could have downloaded off NPM.

They're going to be 100% non functional when that stuff isn't around for them, so the industry can expect to get absolutely fucking raped when that bill comes due.

Would be a good time to invest in Microsoft if they weren't shitting the bed so badly on everything else.

To be fair, I doubt anyone working at a publication that has articles like "Ferry cancellations and delays: your rights" and "What to consider when joining a gym" on the front page knows about microsoft's involvement in npm, TypeScript, GitHub, or VSCode.

Wait till you find out about Microsoft Dynamics 365 increasing their dataverse storage from US$9.95 to US$40 per GB/month!