Lessons from sidestepping Microsoft 365’s aggressive subscription renewal tactics

A few weeks before my long standing Microsoft 365 Family subscription was due for renewal I received an email stating that it will automatically-renew, one thing it failed to mention was the new price was 30% more than last year.

Now even in these inflationary times, this feels like a ridiculously heavy price bump, considering that in 2024 Microsoft had a net income (revenue minus expenses, interest and tax) of $88B thats a 22% increase from 2023. If you’re thinking maybe Office 365 sales weren’t great in 2024 — well they had seen over 11% growth driven by Office 365. In a nutshell, Microsoft have been doing pretty, pretty well, so why the bump? Well, it looks like they want subscribers to adopt their embedded Copilot AI and are aggressively pushing it with all their new and renewing subscriptions.

After reading that first email I went into my Microsoft account management area to see if could find a renewal option similar to my existing 365 Family one without Copilot, I found none. The Microsoft website shows only a new 365 Family plan with Copilot. At this point it felt like they has pulled the rug out from under me. I’ve been a subscriber for well over a decade and use their apps and cloud storage, I was inextricably tied into their platform and they were deploying tactics to aggressively extract more from me.

I didn’t have the bandwidth at this point in time to cleanly migrate my family and data from the 365 platform so I resigned myself to having to pay the higher fee, albeit with a lot of resentment and made a mental note that in the next twelve months to find an alternative office suite and cloud storage provider.

About eight hours later I received another email, stating there was a price change to my subscription.

I dismissed this email as I had already come to the conclusion that I was somewhat stuck with Microsoft 365 for the next twelve months.

Deceptive patterns uncovered

A few days before my renewal was due a friend informed me there was a way to retain the original 365 Family plan without Copilot. It’s only available to existing subscribers that attempt to cancel their subscription, at which point they are presented with this cheaper renewal plan.

Now this option is very much hidden, it’s not meant to be found unless you’re pretty adamant on cancelling and click through on that cancel button. Now I never thought of this as an option, as I had no intention to click on a button that might jeopardise losing all the data I had in the cloud just to switch down on to a different plan.

Following some re-examination of those original emails, I saw the second email has a link to a support article which explains your two main options and in a small foot-note style addendum mentions there is a way to get a plan without Copilot. But of course you have to follow another link to ‘Learn more’ about how to finish the final steps in this dance.

So I could finally renew without the added Copilot feature, but Microsoft had employed some pretty deceptive patterns to hide and obfuscate this renewal option from their existing subscribers.

Let’s do a quick review of the practices deployed in this deceptive pattern,

1. Misleading email messaging
   Email messaging omits information to imply subscribers only have the options presented to them.
2. Lack of transparency on renewal options
   Existing subscribers were not clearly shown or told all their renewal options via email or on platform.
3. Concealed renewal instructions
   Instruction to retain the existing plan are embedded deep in support articles.
4. Hidden user controls
   The action to retain the existing plan is hidden behind a cancel button.

Microsoft seem to be betting on subscriber inertia to increase fees and sell customers something they haven’t really signed up for and hoping they swallow this bitter pill. I expected more from Microsoft, who’ve created a solid design system (Fluent) as well as championed inclusive design even in their new product packaging. It then struck me that I had seen this behaviour before…

The Xbox shuffle

If you have an Xbox you might be familiar with Xbox Game Pass, a subscription service for access to a Netflix style library of games, similarly it comes in a series of different tiers Core, Standard or Ultimate and you pay a monthly subscription fee to access the platform.

Now hold you breath for this part, Game Pass has a feature where if you pay up front for a number of months using gift card codes on a cheaper tier, you can convert these into a slightly fewer months on the higher tier and make a saving on the overall subscription over the period. In short if I buy 3 months of the cheaper (Core) tier I can convert it into just over 2 months of the higher (Ultimate) tier and make a saving over just paying monthly for the higher tier (if you’re inclined here’s an explanation on Game Pass conversions; and the official article about Game Pass conversions).

I’ve done this a number of times to renew my subscription and it’s quite a dance — to make sure you buy the codes for the right region, so you can then add them to your account and finally convert them. It’s a game unto itself.

Microsoft isn’t new to taking advantage of subscriber inertia, in 2022 they were forced to change auto-renewal of Xbox subscriptions in the UK as it was a concern many customers were being charged for services they weren’t using. (Source, Reuters:Microsoft agrees to change Xbox auto-renewal practices in Britain)

Designing systems for trust

In each of these instances the practices employed left me feeling a sense of distrust with Microsoft. I wasn’t just a customer as much as I felt exploited and cheated, in the organisation’s eyes I was simply there as a revenue source to be drained for as much and as long as possible.

These types of practices by their very nature sow distrust, as they’re intentionally designed to mislead, when users uncover them they’re not easily forgiven like a shoddy outdated UI might be.

Good systems embrace design principles that foster transparency, clarity and empower user to have control, these can build customer loyalty and drive advocacy because they’re rooted in a sense of integrity.

I believe as a design community we need to shine a light on these deceptive patterns and questionable practices, so we can continue to keep the importance of responsible design at the forefront of our design discussions.

Together we can set better industry norms that prioritise user trust and engender more honest and equitable experiences. As digital systems grow more powerful and control more of our data, the stakes are only getting higher and ethical design can’t take a back seat.