Is Microsoft 365 free? What it actually costs in 2026
No free tier. It is a paid product.
Consumer: Microsoft 365 Personal $9.99/month or $99.99/year (1 person, 1 TB OneDrive); Family $12.99/month or $129.99/year (up to 6 people, 1 TB each). Business (per user/month, annual commitment, effective July 1, 2026): Basic $7, Standard $14 (adds the desktop apps), Premium $22. Enterprise plans (Office 365 E3, Microsoft 365 E3/E5) run from roughly $26 to $57+ per user/month. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is an additional add-on on most business plans. Prices are per user and recurring; access to the apps ends if the subscription lapses.
What you are locked into
The apps run on an active subscription; cancel it and the installed Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps become view-only. Files, email, and calendars live in OneDrive and Exchange Online by default, and moving an organization off Exchange and Teams is a substantial migration. The document formats themselves are relatively open (DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX are published Office Open XML standards that other suites read and write), so the documents are portable even when the surrounding services are not. The heaviest lock-in is the cloud stack (Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, and identity/admin), not the file formats.
If you would rather not pay: LibreOffice
LibreOffice
The mature, fully open-source desktop office suite that runs entirely on your own machine.
Free / runs locally
See all 4 Microsoft 365 alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Microsoft before you commit. More office & productivity suites decisions on Macrostack.