Windows 365 is a subscription-based software that provides users with a range of features, including Windows 10, Office 365, and more. The cost of Windows 365 varies depending on the edition you choose. The Standard and Enterprise editions both come with a one-time purchase price of $99.99, while the Professional edition costs $199.99 per year. ..
How Expensive Are Microsoft’s Plans?
The initial Windows 365 announcement left us with lots of questions. Now, the biggest of those questions has been answered since we know how much it’ll cost. But there’s a huge difference between $20 and $162 per user per month, so what exactly are you paying for?
It’s pretty simple: the price is determined by the number of virtual cores, amount of RAM, and quantity of storage each person needs for their virtual Windows machine.
That $20 a month option gets you a single virtual core, 2 GB of RAM, and 64 GB of storage. That price is with Windows Hybrid Benefit. Without, the price jumps to $24 per user per month.
At the top end, there’s the $162 option with eight virtual cores, 32 GB of RAM, and 512 GB of storage costs. That price drops to $158 per user per month with the Windows Hybrid Benefit.
Prices are comparable for Business and Enterprise plans. However, on Enterprise, there’s no limit to the number of users.
Regardless of which plan you choose, you’ll get to run all sorts of Windows apps in the cloud, and you’ll even get Windows 11 once it launches.
Is Windows 365 a Good Value?
This is not meant for average computer users, as the price doesn’t make sense for them. For example, you could buy a PC from Dell with 32GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, with an 11th Gen Intel Core i9-11900 processor for around $1,800. That’s about 11 months of the highest plan to own a computer with similar specs and no cloud requirement.
But it’s not as simple as just comparing the specs, as this is meant for businesses that need scalability and not just a single computer. The prices do seem slightly higher than we might have expected, but we’ll have to wait and see if the cloud-based format makes it a worthwhile value proposition for businesses.
When you consider that a company could allow a user to access processor-intensive tasks like video editing without purchasing a new computer, the service starts to make a little more sense.
