There is a date circled on the calendar of many Latin American companies and almost nobody noticed it: October 13, 2026. On that day Office LTSC 2021 stops receiving security fixes, together with Project and Visio 2021. Anyone still running Office 2016 or 2019 went through the same thing in October 2025 and, frankly, many never noticed. The spreadsheets kept opening. Until the day a malicious spreadsheet opens you.
Then comes the question that sounds like an accountant's and is really a strategy question: do I buy Office 2024 once and forget about it for five years, or do I sign up for Microsoft 365 and pay forever?
Microsoft has an obvious answer. It wants the subscription. The interesting part is that, depending on who you are, it may be right. Or not.
The clock Microsoft hung on the wall
One-time Office ships with a built-in timer. Every perpetual version gets five years of support and that is it, no extended support. Office 2016 and 2019 ended on October 14, 2025. Office 2021 ends on October 13, 2026. Office 2024 runs until October 9, 2029.
In other words: whoever buys Office 2024 today, in September 2026, is buying three years of peace of mind, not five. The product still costs the same as at launch, but the clock has already run for two years.
Perpetual, in Microsoft's vocabulary, means "until the next October date we pick".
And there are details that only show up the day after. Publisher, for instance, does not exist in Office 2024 and is retired in October 2026. Anyone with flyers and newsletters built in it will find out at the worst possible moment.
The math that looks simple and is not
Let's use US list prices as a reference, even if the final price varies by country and currency.
Office Home 2024 costs 149.99 dollars, personal use, one computer. Office Home & Business 2024, which includes Outlook and commercial use rights, is 249.99. One payment.
On the subscription side, Microsoft did something it had not done since 2022: it raised commercial prices on July 1, 2026. Business Basic went from 6 to 7 dollars per user per month. Business Standard, the plan with the desktop apps, went from 12.50 to 14. Microsoft 365 Apps for Business, apps only with no email, went from 8.25 to 10. Business Premium stayed at 22. Existing customers only feel the increase at renewal, and consumer plans (Personal at 99.99 dollars a year, Family at 129.99) did not change.
Now the math Microsoft would rather you did not run on a calculator, but which also does not tell the whole story:
| Scenario | Office Home & Business 2024 | Microsoft 365 Business Standard |
|---|---|---|
| Year 1 | 249.99 | 168.00 |
| Year 2 | 0 | 168.00 |
| Year 3 (support ends Oct 2029) | 0 | 168.00 |
| Total through 2029 | 249.99 | 504.00 |
| After Oct 2029 | Buy again (or run unsupported) | Stays the same |
Half the price over three years. Looks settled. Except the right-hand column hides everything the left-hand one does not include.
What you leave at the store when you pay once
The one-time purchase gives you Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and, in the Business edition, Outlook. On one computer. No new features after launch. No cloud storage beyond what your free account already has. No Teams. No business email on your domain. No centralized license management. No Copilot inside the apps.
The subscription gives you the same apps, updated every month, installable on up to five devices per user, plus 1 TB of OneDrive, Teams, Exchange, SharePoint, an admin center and, in the Business plans, a growing security layer that Microsoft used precisely as the argument for the July increase: 50 GB of extra mailbox, link protection in Outlook and Copilot Chat improvements.
That is not a marketing detail. A 15-person company on Business Standard pays about 2,520 dollars a year. The same company with Office 2024 on every machine would spend 3,750 once and be left with no business email, no Teams and 15 installs someone has to manage by hand. Cheap requires a second, invisible budget: making everything else work.
Copilot, the guest who only gets in with a subscription
Here is the real dividing line of 2026. Microsoft made it explicit in its own documentation: Microsoft 365 home and business plans include Copilot in the desktop apps. Office 2024 does not. You can use the free Copilot in the browser next to Word, of course, but the assistant that reads the open document, summarizes the spreadsheet and rewrites the slide lives inside the subscription. And the full Copilot, with agents and access to company context, still requires the paid add-on on top of the plan.
If AI inside Office is a curiosity for you, this does not matter. If it is part of the job, the one-time purchase is born without the feature that half of the next few years' updates will run through.
Who Office 2024 still makes perfect sense for
Not everything is a subscription. Microsoft itself recommends Office LTSC 2024 for fully disconnected scenarios. And there are more cases:
- Machines that never touch the internet: factory floors, labs, regulated environments where a monthly update is a risk, not a benefit.
- Single-purpose machines: a reception PC, a kiosk computer, a station that only prints labels from Excel.
- Anyone who already has email, cloud and chat covered by another vendor and only needs the apps.
- Occasional home use, where 149.99 once beats 99.99 a year in under two years.
If you recognize yourself there, buy Office 2024 without guilt. Just write October 2029 on the calendar and do not act surprised.
The point
The decision is not between paying once and paying forever. It is between buying software and hiring a service. Office 2024 is software: predictable, closed, with an expiry date written on the box. Microsoft 365 is a service: it changes, grows, costs more every cycle and carries with it everything that defines working as a team today.
For most Latin American companies with more than half a dozen people, the subscription wins, not because it is cheaper (it is not), but because what it replaces would cost more assembled separately. For everyone else, Office 2024 remains the best purchase Microsoft does not want you to make.
And when the next October date arrives, you will read it here first. Subscribe to the macareno.net newsletter.
Sources
- Office 2024 and Office LTSC 2024 FAQ, Microsoft Support
- MC1472429: Support for Office LTSC 2021 will end on October 13, 2026, Microsoft 365 Message Center
- Microsoft 365 Pricing and Packaging Updates, Microsoft Licensing
- Microsoft 365 Price Increase 2026: New Prices, WhoodenTech
- What's the difference between Microsoft 365 and Office 2024?, Microsoft Support
- Office 2024 for Windows & Mac: Features, Pricing, Office Watch