Microsoft Launches New Excel Pricing at $0.0008 Per Cell. Power Users Are Running the Numbers.

Microsoft has announced a new pricing tier for Excel, its spreadsheet software used by an estimated 750 million people worldwide, that charges users $0.0008 per cell accessed per session. The company is calling it “Excel Flex” and describing it as a more affordable option for casual users who, Microsoft says, do not need “enterprise-level cell access.”

The announcement, made in a blog post published on a Friday evening under the headline “Exciting New Flexibility in Excel Pricing,” has been met with what can conservatively be described as a mixed response. Within six hours of publication, the post had received 4,200 comments. Microsoft’s community moderation team has described the comment section as “active.”

“Who needs that many cells? Most people use fewer than 200 cells per session. For those people, this is genuinely more affordable.”

— Microsoft Blog Post, paragraph three

Power users, defined by Microsoft as anyone who has ever used a VLOOKUP or heard the word “pivot table” without immediately leaving the room, are less convinced. Several spreadsheet professionals contacted by Not News spent the hours following the announcement doing what spreadsheet professionals do when presented with alarming data: they opened Excel and made a spreadsheet about it.

The results were not reassuring. A financial analyst who works with datasets of approximately 50,000 rows estimated her monthly bill under the new pricing at $3,200, compared to her current Microsoft 365 subscription of $9.99. She asked to remain anonymous because she is still running the numbers and does not want to commit to a figure. “Every time I recalculate,” she said, “it gets worse.”

A freelance accountant, who handles quarterly reports for eleven small businesses, calculated that a single monthly reconciliation spreadsheet would cost approximately $847 under the new model. He has already downloaded LibreOffice. He described the experience as “fine, actually.”

Microsoft has clarified several points since the original post. The $0.0008 per cell charge applies only to cells that are accessed, not merely present in the spreadsheet. Empty cells are free. Cells containing formulas are charged at $0.0012 due to what Microsoft calls “computational overhead.” Conditional formatting is billed separately. The pricing for merged cells is described in the FAQ as “calculated dynamically” and is not further explained.

The company also confirmed that the new tier is optional and that existing Microsoft 365 subscribers will not be automatically migrated. However, new Excel accounts created after the first of next month will default to Excel Flex unless users actively select the flat-rate plan during a sign-up process that Microsoft describes as “straightforward” and that early testers have described as “a series of screens.”

Google, which offers Google Sheets as a free alternative, has not issued a formal statement. Their social media team posted a single spreadsheet emoji at 8am the morning after the announcement. It received 47,000 likes.

Microsoft’s stock rose 0.3% on the day of the announcement. The financial analyst’s spreadsheet tracking the impact of the new pricing on her annual costs has, as of press time, 94,000 cells. She has not yet calculated what the spreadsheet about the pricing would itself cost under the new pricing.