Microsoft closes Outlook.com Premium to new subscribers, eight months after its launch from public preview, and adds some of its features to Office 365
Paul Thurrott / Thurrott.com :
Context & Ripple Effects
Outlook.com Premium had a short, well-documented run: Microsoft began piloting the service with custom domain support in early 2016, moved to $3.99/month trials that spring, and opened a US public preview in October 2016 with a $20/year promotional rate ahead of a $50/year list price. In February 2017 it went generally available for US users on that same pricing.
Eight months after general availability, Microsoft has stopped accepting new subscribers and is shifting some of Premium's features — the ad-free inbox and custom-domain hooks among them — into Office 365. The standalone experiment is effectively being absorbed into the broader bundle.
First-order effects
- Existing Outlook.com Premium subscribers retain their service, but new customers can no longer buy the $50/year standalone plan and must instead get its features through an Office 365 subscription.
Second-order effects
- Office 365 becomes Microsoft's only paid consumer path to an ad-free inbox and custom domains, strengthening the bundle's value pitch against Google's free Gmail and removing a competing low-priced SKU from Microsoft's own lineup.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Microsoft will keep folding niche consumer subscriptions into the Office 365 umbrella rather than maintaining à la carte paid tiers — concentrating recurring revenue in one bundle and making single-purpose paid services harder to justify.
The trend: Consumer webmail monetization is consolidating from standalone premium tiers into broad productivity bundles, with Microsoft using Office 365 as the catch-all.