She Left Microsoft 365 When Copilot Raised the Bill

Megan Ellis cancelled her Microsoft 365 renewal after one year and moved her tax sheets and stray documents onto free LibreOffice apps. She had subscribed in 2025 for a newer Excel, then found she was paying for a full suite, Copilot, and 1 TB of OneDrive while using two programs.

The bill she walked away from is the Copilot-era Personal plan. Microsoft folded its assistant into consumer 365 in January 2025 and raised U.S. prices for the first time since 2013, which is how a light home user ended up in Calc and Writer.

She Paid for a Suite She Barely Opened

Ellis, a software writer, said her main reason for subscribing was Excel, because the last copy she had used dated to 2013. She tried Python in Excel and liked being able to set sheets to dark mode, then barely touched either perk through the year.

She mainly opens spreadsheets when filing taxes and tracking expenses. When she asked Copilot to sort tax data, the tool did not help, and she used other chatbots to hunt missing transactions instead. Word was the only other app she really opened, and even then it was forms and the odd file; most writing lived in note apps or a CMS.

PowerPoint, Outlook, and the rest sat unused for the whole term. The 1 TB of cloud storage sat unused too, because she already backs up important files to a NAS. “I was paying for an entire office suite and cloud storage when I only occasionally used two apps,” she wrote. Copilot, which Microsoft had just made a selling point of the subscription, stayed mostly idle.

Microsoft Raised Personal by $30 for Copilot

On January 16, 2025, Bryan Rognier, vice president for Microsoft 365 Consumer, said Copilot and Designer were coming to Personal and Family in most markets, reaching most of the company’s 84 million consumer subscribers. Family Copilot stays with the subscription owner and cannot be shared. The same note announced the first U.S. price increase since launch, $3 a month, billed at the next renewal.

THE U.S. CONSUMER PRICE SHIFT

Monthly Personal is $9.99; monthly Family is $12.99. Microsoft later added a Premium tier at $19.99 a month, or $199.99 a year, for higher Copilot usage. Existing subscribers with recurring billing could move to Basic or, for a limited time, to Personal Classic or Family Classic plans without Copilot credits. Those Classic options sit in the cancellation flow. They are not a plan a new buyer can pick off the store shelf.

For a person who wanted current Excel and almost nothing else, the extra $30 bought an assistant she already found useless on the one job she tried. Microsoft said customers who do not want the assistant can turn Copilot off in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Turning it off does not put the old $69.99 price back.

LibreOffice Calc Took Over the Tax Sheets

After the Microsoft 365 term ended, Ellis wanted an open-source suite that still opened the files she had. She picked LibreOffice for ease of use and format support. Calc replaced Excel; Writer replaced Word.

WHAT SHE RUNS INSTEAD

• Calc for Excel: Table filters help her sort long transaction lists, and the formulas she needs for taxes are there.
• Writer for Word: Simple processing and formatting are close enough that she does not miss Word for forms and occasional documents.
• NAS for OneDrive: Local backup already covered the 1 TB she never used, so the cloud quota was not a reason to renew.
• Proton Drive for a few files: The free tier holds the small set of documents she wants reachable from a browser.

LibreOffice also ships Impress, Draw, Base, and Math. She has not used them, because they do not fit her work. The difference, she wrote, is that “because the office suite is free, I don’t feel like I’m wasting money by not using all the included apps.”

The friction she did notice is dark theme. She can render a document with a black background and white text, but LibreOffice apps are inconsistent, and text sometimes stays dark enough to be hard to read. She is willing to live with that quirk. Apps also used to log her out of Microsoft 365, which added friction she does not miss.

LibreOffice 26.8 Treats No AI as a Feature

Ellis published that account on April 12, 2026. Four months later The Document Foundation shipped LibreOffice 26.8, and it drew a hard line where Microsoft had bundled a chatbot into the home plan.

LibreOffice 26.8 contains no generative AI features. Documents are not transmitted to remote services for processing, and no component of the suite requires network access to function. This is a deliberate position.

The Document Foundation, LibreOffice 26.8 announcement

The August 26, 2026 release is the work of 206 contributors, 155 of them volunteers, and it is offered for Windows, macOS, and Linux in 120 languages. The no generative AI features stance is the point TDF spent a follow-up post defending. For a company that sells subscriptions, the foundation wrote, an AI assistant justifies a price increase and keeps documents inside that company’s own systems. TDF has no subscription tiers to protect and no data to sell, so it will not put AI in the default install until a user can choose the machine that runs it, keep document content off the network unless they send it, and avoid a single-vendor API.

People who want a local model can add a third-party extension that talks to Ollama, LM Studio, or another OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Those add-ons are not TDF’s, and they stay off the default desktop.

THE YEAR THE HOME PLAN CHANGED

1. January 16, 2025: Microsoft adds Copilot to consumer Personal and Family plans and raises U.S. prices by $3 a month at renewal.
2. 2025: Ellis subscribes for a current Excel, uses Word and Excel, skips Copilot and OneDrive, then cancels at renewal.
3. April 12, 2026: She writes that LibreOffice covers the gap and that she does not miss the subscription.
4. August 26, 2026: LibreOffice 26.8 ships with no generative AI and no network requirement.
5. September 2, 2026: TDF counts 1,031,162 downloads in its first week from the official page, a project record, not counting Linux package installs.
6. October 2, 2026: LibreOffice 26.8.1 is announced with around 40 fixes, then delayed over download-mirror trouble, so 26.8.0 stays on the download page.

That first-week figure is not a census of people leaving Microsoft. It is still the busiest opening week TDF has measured, and it landed on a release whose headline was the missing chatbot.

Who Can Leave Microsoft 365?

Ellis could cancel because her work never lived in the parts Microsoft prices as the product. She did not depend on shared OneDrive folders, Teams, or a workplace that emails.xlsx files with macros nobody else will touch. Calc’s filters and formulas covered tax season. Writer covered forms. The NAS already held backups.

That is a narrower door than the “ditch your subscription” lists imply. On X, Microsoft 365 to LibreOffice now sits in the same breath as Photoshop to GIMP, a default tip in posts that tell people to stop paying for software they barely open. The sharper split is personal versus forced. Plenty of home work already runs fine in Calc and Writer. The copy that still requires 365 is the file a company, a school, or a client will only open in Word or Excel.

The other objection that travels farther than any tax-spreadsheet win is the look of the thing. LibreOffice can do the job on day one and still present a default interface that people mock as dated next to Microsoft’s ribbon. Feature parity on filters is not the same as feeling current, and that gap is what keeps some light users paying.

WHAT WE KNOW

• Her stack: Calc, Writer, a NAS, and a little Proton Drive replaced a Personal subscription she underused.
• The hike: U.S. Personal moved from $69.99 to $99.99 a year when Copilot was bundled, the first increase since 2013.
• The alternative’s pitch: LibreOffice 26.8 runs offline, ships without generative AI, and needs no account.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• How many seats left: Microsoft has not published consumer churn tied to the Copilot price change.
• Classic’s remaining window: Personal Classic still appears for some accounts in cancellation, and it is not a guarantee for every renewing subscriber.

Anyone still shopping Microsoft’s store is looking at a Personal plan at $99.99 a year with Copilot in the desktop apps, 1 TB of OneDrive, and sign-in on five devices. That is a fair price if the household uses the cloud, the mail, and the assistant. It is a steep rent on two apps and a disk she already owned.

Proton Drive Covers Cloud Files, Not Dark Mode

LibreOffice has no hosted editor she can open in a browser, which is the one hole Calc does not fill. For documents that need to live in the cloud, Ellis has been using Proton Drive, in part to cut down on Google as well as Microsoft. Proton’s clients are open source, and the company sells privacy as the product: files are encrypted so that Proton itself cannot read them.

The free plan includes 5 GB, which she says is enough for the few files she wants online. Paid Drive Plus lists 200 GB at $4.99 a month if that quota runs out. Proton also ships an end-to-end encrypted spreadsheet editor inside Drive, with live collaboration, common formulas, and CSV or XLS import, aimed at people who want a Sheets-style grid that is not scanned for ads or model training.

She has not made Proton her primary office suite. Proton Sheets has no dark mode and ignores her browser’s dark-mode flags. She has chronic migraines, so that is not a cosmetic miss. Until Sheets respects dark mode, the encrypted grid stays a side option, and LibreOffice on the desktop does the real work.

The “free” stack is free of Microsoft’s $99.99 clock. It is not free of polish debts. Writer’s dark theme is patchy. Sheets has none. Anyone who needs a shared workbook in a browser still has to pick a host, and Proton is the privacy pick, not the feature pick.

Work Still Runs on Word and Excel Files

LibreOffice 26.8 spends a lot of engineering on files it still cannot fully draw. Chart can import and re-export newer OOXML types Microsoft Office writes, including waterfall, sunburst, treemap, funnel, Pareto, and box-and-whisker. It cannot yet render or edit them. It keeps the definition so the file returns to Office intact. That is the adult version of Ellis’s tax-sheet win: the home user can leave, and the document still has to survive a round trip into a workplace that never left.

On October 2, 2026, TDF said LibreOffice 26.8.1 was ready with around 40 fixes aimed at Microsoft OOXML, then pulled the upload because of mirror trouble. Version 26.8.0 is what the download page still offers. For someone following Ellis’s path, that is the suite that opens the tax file, skips Copilot, and does not charge $99.99 to sit idle. She wrote in April that she does not miss the subscription. The plan she left is still priced for an assistant she did not use.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Microsoft Still Sell a One-Time Office License?

Microsoft’s store still lists Office Home 2024 as a one-time purchase for one PC or Mac at $179.99, with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook on that machine and no Copilot allotment and no 1 TB of OneDrive. It is the paid path for people who want Microsoft’s apps without a renewal, and it costs more up front than two years of the old $69.99 Personal plan.

How Long Does LibreOffice 26.2 Stay Supported?

The Document Foundation says the LibreOffice 26.2 branch reaches end of life on November 30, 2026, and it has told production users to plan a move into the 26.8 family before that date. Community releases do not carry the three-to-five-year security window that LibreOffice ecosystem companies sell to organisations under support contracts.

Can a New Buyer Get Microsoft 365 Personal Classic?

No. Personal Classic and Family Classic were framed as a limited downgrade for existing subscribers with recurring billing, offered inside the cancel-subscription path, not as a SKU on the public compare page. New customers are sold the Copilot-inclusive Personal, Family, or Premium plans at the post-January 2025 prices.

What File Types Does Proton Sheets Open?

Proton documents CSV and XLS import and export for Sheets, plus real-time collaboration on a Drive account. The ODS format LibreOffice uses as its native spreadsheet type is not listed among the launch import types, so a Calc file still wants a conversion or a download before it becomes a Proton grid.