Is Microsoft 365 free? What it actually costs in 2026

What the free tier actually includes

• —Web and mobile apps only — no installed desktop Office
• —5 GB of OneDrive storage
• —Collaboration requires the file to live in OneDrive
• —No business email, admin or security controls — those are the business plans

Where the wall is

Two walls. The first is the desktop: anything that needs installed Word or Excel — macros, add-ins, large files, offline work — is paid. The second is 5 GB, which a single phone's photo backup can fill.

After that: Personal is $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year; Family $12.99 a month or $129.99 a year; Premium $19.99 a month or $199.99 a year. Business plans are priced on a separate page.

Can you self-host Microsoft 365? No — cloud only

Microsoft 365 is a hosted service. The open-source office suites compared here — LibreOffice on the desktop, ONLYOFFICE and Collabora Online on a server — are the self-hosted route, and they open and save Office formats.

What it actually takes to run one yourself

Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.

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