The Cheaper Microsoft 365 Plan Sits Behind the Cancel Button. The CMA Opened a Case on 29 July

If you pay for Microsoft 365 Personal or Family, there is a cheaper plan called Classic that keeps the pre-Copilot feature set at the pre-Copilot price, and Microsoft does not advertise it. In the UK that is 59.99 pounds a year instead of 84.99 for Personal, and 79.99 instead of 104.99 for Family. On 29 July 2026 the Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation (opened 29 July 2026) into whether customers were told enough about those options before their subscriptions renewed at the higher price. Whatever the outcome, the action for you today is the same: check which plan you are on, and check every other subscription that quietly grew an AI feature and a bigger invoice.

The numbers both regulators put on the record

The CMA lists the current UK prices side by side. Australia's competition regulator went further in October 2025 and sued. Between them the two filings give the clearest public picture of the price step.

Method: UK figures are the annual prices published in the CMA's 29 July 2026 announcement; the monthly equivalents it lists are 5.99 against 8.49 pounds for Personal and 7.99 against 10.49 for Family, so paying monthly widens the annual gap to 30 pounds. Australian figures are from the ACCC media release of 27 October 2025 (opened 29 July 2026). Percentages are our arithmetic on those published numbers.

What the ACCC says the journey looked like

The Australian case is the more detailed of the two. The ACCC alleges that since 31 October 2024 Microsoft told roughly 2.7 million Australian subscribers on auto-renewal that they had two choices: accept Copilot and pay more, or cancel. The regulator says a third option existed the whole time. In the words of ACCC Chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb, "Microsoft deliberately omitted reference to the Classic plans in its communications and concealed their existence until after subscribers initiated the cancellation process." The ACCC is seeking penalties, injunctions, declarations, consumer redress and costs. Microsoft has filed a defence and none of this has been decided by a court.

The CMA's framing is narrower and, for now, procedural. Its stated scope is whether customers "were given key information about the plans and the difference in cost to understand the options available to them before making a decision," with the new features having arrived automatically from January 2025 and the CMA's direct consumer enforcement powers dating from April 2025. Its own words on why it cares: "it's important that people are clear on the price and the subscription plans available, so they can find the right deal for them." An investigation is not a finding.

Finding the Classic plan yourself

Here is a thing worth knowing before you go looking. Microsoft has a support article whose URL is literally titled "switching to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family Classic plans." Open it today and it is a page about moving between the current plans; Classic appears only in a table showing how remaining days convert when you upgrade away from it. There is no documented route to a Classic plan on Microsoft's own switching page (opened 29 July 2026). That absence is not a small detail. It is close to the centre of what both regulators are asking about.

What the ACCC describes, and what subscribers report, is that the Classic option surfaces inside the cancellation flow. So the sequence is:

1. Go to your Microsoft account subscriptions page and sign in with the account that holds the subscription, not a work account that happens to be open.
2. Find the Microsoft 365 Personal or Family entry and open Manage.
3. Select Cancel subscription. This is the uncomfortable step and the one that hides the offer. You are not confirming anything yet.
4. Read the retention screen that follows. If a Personal Classic or Family Classic option appears, that is the plan at the old price.
5. If nothing appears, stop and contact Microsoft support rather than completing the cancellation. Availability appears to vary by market and by account, and we cannot verify from any Microsoft page who is eligible.

Two caveats we could not resolve from a first-party source. Community threads say Classic is a limited offer that can be withdrawn, and that auto-renew has to stay on to keep it. Neither claim appears on a Microsoft support page we could open, so treat both as unconfirmed and screenshot whatever you are shown. Also note the scope: this is about the consumer Personal and Family plans. Microsoft 365 Business subscriptions are a separate product line and are not part of either regulator's case.

Is the Copilot tier worth 25 pounds a year anyway?

Sometimes, and the test is usable in about five minutes. Twenty-five pounds a year is a little over two pounds a month. The question is not "is AI useful" but "does this specific AI, inside these specific apps, replace something you already pay for or do by hand." If you are already paying for a standalone assistant subscription, the bundled one may let you cancel the other, and then it is obviously worth it. If you have opened Copilot in Word twice since January 2025, you are paying a subscription for a button. Check your own usage before deciding: the answer differs per person and neither regulator is arguing the feature has no value.

The renewal audit to run this week

Microsoft is the one being investigated, but the pattern is now everywhere: an AI feature arrives in software you already pay for, the price steps up at renewal, and the announcement email describes the feature rather than the choice. Run this on every recurring line in your bank statement.

• List every subscription whose price changed in the last 18 months. Your card statement is a better source than your inbox, because the renewal emails are the ones designed to be skimmed.
• For each one, search the vendor's site for the words "classic," "legacy," "previous plan" and "grandfathered." These are the standard names for the cheaper twin.
• Open the cancellation flow deliberately, without completing it. Retention offers are frequently the only place a cheaper tier is shown. Take a screenshot of anything you are offered, including the price and the date.
• Check whether the new feature duplicates something else you buy. A bundled assistant that lets you drop a separate 20 pounds a month tool is a saving, not a rise.
• Set a calendar reminder for two weeks before each renewal date. Every lever in this list is easier before the charge than after it, and the rules on what a cancellation flow must look like vary by jurisdiction.

If that list runs to more than a handful of lines, the wider exercise is a full audit of AI tool spend, where the same question gets asked of every tool rather than only the ones that raised a price. And if you sell software yourself, read the CMA's sentence about "key information about the plans and the difference in cost" as a specification for your own pricing page, not as somebody else's problem: the same logic applies when you run more than one price for the same product.