Office 365 Copilot Pricing: $30/month per user | Hacker News Reader

Office 365 Copilot Pricing: $30/month per user

onmsft.com

51 pointsnycdatasci40 comments

Since the price is per individual employee, I can already see my ex-company CEO paying it for him, but not for the rest of the company, the same way he was always buying himself the latest fully-loaded MacBook Pro with 5K display at every new launch to write emails and use Slack, while the engineers building the products were still using Dells with 8GB RAM and 1080p monitors.

This community here at HN has taught me that CEOs often do work that us engineers are not aware of. It's possible that your ex CEO was doing work that required such a machine.

Highly doubtful. The CEO is probably out on a golf course or pretending to look at a slide show.

And the engineers weren't? His MacBook was just an Office 365 and iCloud machine.

Don't many engineers just use their laptop as a thin client to remote into servers?

Not us, we did FW dev. Not every SW engineer is a web dev working in cloud, even on HN. Also in web dev many run and test things locally so working with good machines helps.

Also, the equipment you get shows you how little a company values its engineers and how much it values its management. If they insist on giving you the cheapest bottom of the barrel laptop and monitors they can find, they probably won't pay you competitively as well. A lesson I found the hard way.

Yea, to back up the point some more. I work on a completely desktop enterprise solution. So there is no offloading the work from my machine either. Our test suite even on moderately fast hardware still takes about 10 minutes to run the full suite parallelized.

Don't worry, next year Microsoft will offer an AI CEO for only $50/month.

I had a friend give me a cogent explanation of why it's important for engineers to run and test their code on the level of computer that the final users will have. Otherwise the engineers end up saying dumb things like, "It didn't run out of memory on my Dual Xeon with 128gb of RAM and superfast ssds."

Having some shit devices in the office for testing is one thing, having all your engineers use shit HW leading to long compile times (this was FW dev, not web-dev) because you're a stingy CEO who thinks your team of 6 engineers don't deserve decent HW even though you're indulging yourself in it, is another.

To me this attitude is common among developers too. If there is a took that will save them 10 hours a week but costs 20 dollars they won't do it. Never met such an insanely cheap group of people.

I am a developer BTW. I love paying for tools or hardware. I don't want to waste money but if something is going to make me faster or better I'm gonna do it.

I once got laughed at by a bunch of my colleagues for paying 400 bucks for intellij. That's like 25 cents an hour for a years work. After 2 years its 12.5 cents

It was a no brainer While they struggled with eclipse I motored through with IDEA

Why would a developer care about saving 10 hours a week for their job such that they pay out of pocket for a tool? That's moronic. I don't get paid for productivity. I get paid to meet deadlines with the tools available to me via my employer. If I compile* for 10 hours a week that's 10 hours I can do anything else. It's a free 10 hour a week break for me.

*compile for the joke but I mean slowdown in activity at all.

Yeah this is the attitude I'm talking about. You go ahead and save 25 cents an hour. I'll get way more done, get stand out more, get promoted faster.

In 10 hours I can probably close out 7 or maybe more small tickets.

Those colleagues ended up stuck where they were and I ended up making 4x what they were. It's not just because the ID but becauae of mentality that you support.

I don't want a 10 hour break I want to produce the most I can in the hours I have. That allowed me to make enough to retire at 33 with no stock grants.

Dude, I don't care about a promotion. I'll be job hopped in a year or two and making more than the promotion would have netted me and I'll be working 30 hour weeks in this example. We're not paid to be as productive as possible we're paid to deliver code on schedule. As long as I get my tickets taken care of for the sprint that's all I care about. Doing more tickets than necessary is just doing extra work for no benefit.

Now, if my employer wants to pay for that tool or hardware or whatever? Sign me up. I'll use it all day.

You left another comment I can't reply to because I guess it's too nested. Well you do what you want.

If you are the most productive person at the company you are the most valuable. I've had companies literally double my money to keep me when I was going to leave. But if you want to mail it in then feel free.

Likewise. If you find happiness being incredibly productive.. then that's fantastic and I wish you the best. I've never worked anywhere that productivity actually mattered for anything. I work a place for a year or two and hop and get massive salary increases each time. If you get satisfaction and all that from doing as you do I'm happy for you and wish you the best.

Okay I guess it's a timing thing because now I can reply at this level. I've always job hopped as well. I've actually only been an employee once, I prefer contract work, and a lot of times I worked 30 hours a week for free! Just because I want to come in, kill it, I get offered even more money to stay.

I've watched a lot of people though who refuse to spend any money out of pocket and aren't job hoppers, and also are resistant to do anything but the status quo. They lost out.

I would understand the resistance but ultimately if we are talking about me giving up $1 an hour to be 20% more productive, even if you stayed at a job for a year or two you are going to in my experience get a good ROI on that.

A good recent example is ChatGPT. I know some not so great programmers who I told "Hey this can really make a big difference for you as far as learning goes". Not saying to use the code, but just to ask it "How do I do X?".

They are like "Nah, I don't care". Well that's fine but I think that's a loser mentality, and it has only worked because coders have been in such incredible demand you can be pretty bad and still earn 6 figures.

I can definitely appreciate that is your perspective. I have never worked anywhere that it was accurate nor have I ever worked with or known anyone that had the same experience you have. The average raise at these places is about 0%. At the high end it's maybe 4% or 5%. You know what the difference is between the 0 and the 5? Brown nosing your boss and HR. It's not getting more work done.

Most developers don't make six figures, either. Most make 40,000 to 65,000, if that.

If an employer wants me to do extra work they have to pay me to do that work. As a salaried exempt employee they cannot do that. They don't get extra work.

> Most developers don't make six figures, either. Most make 40,000 to 65,000, if that.

What do you live that they make such little money? The median developer income is 120k https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/software-develope...

I don't know anyone making under 100k unless they are brand new. I also don't know any places that give 0% raises.

I have known multiple people under 20 who are no geniuses who are earning close to 6 figures as developers.

This is literally the best STEM job and it pays a ton. If you are making peanuts if you are making 65k and either need to move on, or possibly your bad attitude has kept you at a company that doesn't pay much.

What I make is irrelevant. I do not care for your victim blaming, either. I see that we cannot continue this conversation in good faith. You take care.

You right we cannot. Because you have lied.

Whatever makes you feel better, bud.

Your company didn’t pay for the license? The first thing I asked for is an intellij license.

Nope they wouldn't pay. No big deal

None of the companies I've worked for would either. "Just use VScode".

I ended up buying the Jetbrains individual subscription, which ends up being like $100/year after the first year or so. Totally fair pricing and I never have to ask my employer for that again (which matters because I change employers more often than I change IDEs).

That's why having separate (ancient) test devices is important.

But you really don't want to be doing development on those devices. Some software can take several minutes to compile (eg for C++) on modern hardware.

No need to stretch that time to "an hour" by using a dual core Celeron. ;)

I'd pay 10x that for it to just attend the meetings on my behalf, pretend to be me, and summarize them afterward into actionable bullet points.

"Have your AI talk to my AI."

Attend my Teams meeting choosing an avatar that nods occasionally and laugh as jokes are told and give appropriate non committal responses like "Hmm" - "Let me get back to you about that"

Whoa. Are you my coworker? Are you ME?

Forget that, have all members of a meeting be ai, each person gives them talking points.

It will either break things, or the meeting was pointless in the first case.

Now that would be useful!!

"I'll have lunch with your machine."

I do that already - it’s called an assistant. More like 300x, but my job is too complicated for an LLM to effectively communicate with todays tech.

$30/month for a mail/document filter which automatically junks AI-generated material would be better value....

For context,

- E3 tier cost $36/month

- E5 tier cost $57/month

So this is a substantial increase in pricing for this capability. Essentially 2x the cost of E3 tier which include the entire office suite + hosting

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...

I'm guessing it's not that bad, considering the resource costs for actually running the AI interaction. The Github Copilot is a much smaller audience, and probably a much smaller dataset as well that allowed good test results for the larger product.

All said, I don't use Word or Outlook enough that I'd pay that much for it, it just isn't worth it to me. But I know a lot of people that absolutely would.

Well, looks like I'll never be using copilot.

I'm on the free/floss tier for Github Copilot, it's basically a really advanced autocomplete and not bad at boilerplate work... best example, was writing SQL for an initial schema, having an AppUser table and a Role table, the completion for AppUserRole was spot on. Other stuff, less so but still relatively helpful.

Not sure about the Office version though, the pricing is probably appropriate for the actual resources it uses, if you use Word or Outlook enough for it to make a difference. I don't see too many individuals who aren't students using it enough to be worth it. But there are definitely a handful in probably ever company with over a hundred people in it.

If Copilot is actually good at taking an outline and making fluffy slides to present to execs, I’d pay 5x that without blinking. As I doubt it, I am looking to fiver…

Doesn't seem like a bad price consider how much other enterprise Saas products cost per seat. Costs do add up to hefty amount unfortunately.

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