As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Amazon sells Microsoft 365 and Office Home 2024, and the three Amazon links below are tagged and can earn us a fee. Microsoft’s own pages, LibreOffice and Google pay us nothing — and two of those three are the recommendation for a large group of readers at the bottom. Every price here was read from the company’s own site, not from an Amazon listing.
Microsoft 365 Personal is $99.99 a year. Read from Microsoft’s own comparison page on 17 September 2026. Microsoft 365 Family is $129.99 a year for up to six people, and the new Premium tier is $199.99 a year.
The question is not whether Word is good software. It is whether you need the desktop version of it, because the browser version has been free for years and Microsoft says so on its own site.
The four prices, and the annual figures
| Plan | Monthly | Yearly | Cost if you pay monthly | People |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft 365 Personal | $9.99 | $99.99 | $119.88 | 1 |
| Microsoft 365 Family | $12.99 | $129.99 | $155.88 | 1–6 |
| Microsoft 365 Premium | $19.99 | $199.99 | $239.88 | 1–6 |
| Office Home 2024 | — | $179.99 once | — | 1 PC or Mac |
All four read from Microsoft’s comparison page on 17 September 2026.
The monthly column is the first trap. Microsoft prices Personal at $9.99 a month, which is $119.88 a year — $19.89 more than the $99.99 annual plan for exactly the same thing. Family monthly costs $25.89 more; Premium, $39.89 more. Microsoft labels the annual saving as “up to 17%”, and it is the least demanding 17% you will earn this year. If you are on monthly billing out of habit, switching is free money, for the reasons we set out in annual vs monthly billing.
The calculation: divide Family by the number of humans
This is the one piece of arithmetic that decides most of these purchases.
Microsoft 365 Family is $129.99 a year for up to six people, each with their own account and their own 1TB of storage (up to 6TB across the plan). So:
- 1 person — $129.99 each. Worse than Personal at $99.99.
- 2 people — $65.00 each per year, $5.42 a month.
- 3 people — $43.33 each.
- 4 people — $32.50 each.
- 6 people — $21.67 each per year. $1.81 a month.
Count the adults in your house with their own laptop, then count the ones paying for cloud storage separately. At three or more people, Family is one of the least stupid subscriptions in this entire site’s database, and anybody in that household still paying $99.99 for their own Personal plan is burning the difference for no reason.
The reverse also holds: if you are one person, Family is worse value than Personal unless you can name the other people. “My partner might use it” is not a name.
Against Office Home 2024: the break-even is 22 months
Microsoft still sells Office as a one-time purchase. Office Home 2024 is $179.99, paid once, for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote on a single PC or Mac.
Against Personal at $99.99 a year:
- Year 1 — subscription $99.99, one-time $179.99. Buying costs $80.00 more.
- Year 2 — subscription $199.98 total. One-time still $179.99. The one-time purchase pulls ahead at roughly 22 months.
- Year 5 — subscription $499.95, one-time $179.99. You are $319.96 ahead by having bought it.
So the sticker says the subscription is cheaper and the calendar says it isn’t. What you give up by buying once is real, and Microsoft’s own comparison table spells it out: Office Home 2024 carries no cloud storage, no Outlook, no Microsoft Teams, no Defender, no Editor, no Access and no Forms. It is four apps on one machine.
That is a good trade for one specific person: one computer, files kept locally, no interest in AI. For a household with phones, tablets and shared files, it isn’t.
What “free” actually gets you
Microsoft publishes this itself, which makes it hard to argue with. On Microsoft’s free apps page, a free Microsoft account gets you Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the browser, the mobile versions of those apps plus OneDrive and Outlook, and 5GB of cloud storage.
Not a trial. Not a limited-time offer. The free tier, described on Microsoft’s own site on 17 September 2026.
Two other options cost nothing at all:
- LibreOffice — a full desktop suite, currently version 26.8.0, free to download for Windows, macOS and Linux. It opens and saves .docx and .xlsx. No account, no renewal, no upsell.
- Google Docs, Sheets and Slides — free, with 15GB of storage shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos, per Google’s own plans page on 17 September 2026. Paid Google storage starts at $1.99 a month for 100GB, with 2TB now bundled into Google AI Plus at $9.99 a month (monthly rates; Google advertises a further discount of up to 16% for paying yearly, which we could not read exact figures for).
The honest test is not a feature list. It is this: in the last year, did you open a file that the browser version refused to handle properly? Macros, heavy pivot work, large datasets, precise print layout, working on a plane. If you can’t remember an instance, the desktop apps are not what you are paying for.
The storage is the actual product
For a lot of people Microsoft 365 isn’t an Office subscription at all — it’s a 1TB cloud drive with Word attached.
Price it that way and it holds up. Personal is $99.99 a year for 1TB plus the desktop apps. Google’s 2TB tier costs $9.99 a month — $119.88 a year if paid monthly, and includes no office suite. If you genuinely store hundreds of gigabytes, Microsoft is the cheaper shelf, and the apps arrive free.
If you store 30GB of photos and some tax PDFs, you are paying $99.99 a year for 1TB to hold 3% of it. Google’s free 15GB or its $1.99-a-month 100GB tier covers you, as we worked through in Google One vs iCloud+ vs Dropbox. Microsoft does sell a cheaper storage-only tier too, but its OneDrive plan-comparison page blocked our request on 17 September 2026, so we can’t quote that price and won’t guess at it.
Premium: $70 a year for the AI
Microsoft 365 Premium is $199.99 a year against Family’s $129.99 — $70.00 more, for extra Copilot usage, agentic AI features and advanced Copilot chat, per Microsoft’s comparison table. Note that Family already includes Copilot, though Microsoft states AI is for the subscription owner only on that plan.
Seventy dollars a year is $5.83 a month for AI inside Word and Excel. That is cheap next to a standalone AI subscription — and it is also a worse assistant than a dedicated one for most tasks that aren’t editing a document. If AI is the reason you’re upgrading, price it against the alternatives in our roundup of the best AI subscription before you commit an extra $70 a year to it.
Where to buy it
Amazon sells all three as digital downloads, shipped and sold by Amazon.com Services LLC — confirmed on 17 September 2026: Microsoft 365 Personal 12-month, Microsoft 365 Family 12-month and Office Home 2024. We don’t quote Amazon’s prices here — compare them yourself against Microsoft’s figures above, and check whether the listing you pick auto-renews, because the 12-month cards and the auto-renewing subscriptions are different products at similar prices.
The verdict
Worth it if three or more people in your house will each use an account. At $21.67 a person per year for six, Family is the cheapest way any of them will ever buy Office plus a terabyte of storage. Buy the annual plan, not the monthly one, and save $25.89 for the effort of clicking a different button.
Worth it if you genuinely keep hundreds of gigabytes in the cloud. $99.99 a year for 1TB undercuts Google’s 2TB tier at $119.88 paid monthly, and Microsoft throws in the desktop apps.
Don’t buy it if you are one person who writes a few documents a month and already lives in a browser. Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the web are free, forever, from Microsoft, and 5GB is more than enough for documents. You are being asked for $99.99 a year — $999.90 over a decade — for desktop versions of apps you would open in a tab anyway.
Don’t buy the subscription if you have one computer, no interest in Copilot, and you keep your files locally. Office Home 2024 at $179.99 costs more today and less after 22 months, and LibreOffice costs nothing at all.
And don’t buy Personal if anyone you live with has Family. Ask to be added. That is a $99.99-a-year line item that disappears in about four minutes — the same category of forgotten spend we cover in our guide to cancelling subscriptions you forgot about, and the same one-question test we applied to Adobe Creative Cloud: count what you actually opened last month.
Prices verified 17 September 2026 at the source: Microsoft’s own Microsoft 365 comparison page and its free-apps page, one.google.com/about/plans, and libreoffice.org. Microsoft’s OneDrive plan-comparison page blocked our request, so its standalone storage tier is unpriced here rather than guessed. We analyse published pricing and terms; we don’t test software.