Outlook.com Premium standalone was discontinued in October

Dec 30, 2017

I am playing catch up on this topic. Apparently at the end of October, Microsoft discontinued the standalone sales of Outlook.com Premium edition. The features that came with that (ad free web use, larger mailbox, and more) are now included free if you have an Office 365 subscription (Home or Personal), and if you are using a standard outlook.com email address along with that subscription. More information here:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Premium-Outlook-com-features-for-Office-365-subscribers-78c6089c-7faf-44f5-82e2-efa9ebb921d2

Apparently if you already subscribed to the standalone premium version, which I described in this article, you can continue that subscription, they just aren’t accepting new standalone subscriptions. And whether that includes customers using a custom domain address to continue using that is not clear. But, per this post, it appears not.

It sure looks like Microsoft is wanting customers who need a custom domain to subscribe to Office 365 Business and get Exchange instead.

The good news is, you can subscribe to Exchange at roughly the same price as the old Outlook.com Premium. What do I mean by that? Well, Outlook.com Premium listed at $49 a year (after the initial discount). Today you can buy Office 365 Business Essentials  at $5 a month, which is $60 a year per user, and that’s a subscription to Exchange. (Note that domain registration services would be separate and additional). So if you already have your own custom domain name, you can get a full Exchange subscription at only $11 more a year than the old Outlook.com Premium subscription. Not a bad deal for the extras of Exchange.

Michael

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