Yup still working - bought 4 personal codes from eBay (2 from the US and 2 from the UK), stacked up the product codes then ordered the Home 1 month from MS store and boom, there it is a nice home subscription until 3rd Aug 2019 - fan flipping tastic!

Very proud to say this thread's just gone over 1,000 degrees heat :smile:
Glad this upgrade behaviour is still working and is liked/has helped out soo many! :sunglasses:

Hi,

Anyone got any ideas with this.

Stacked 4 x codes and when I visit Microsoft it gets stuck on this site. microsoftstore.com/store/ . Its seems to be stuck on an eligability checker... Any items. have tried another PC

Think it has something to do with payments... Have added a credit card and it just gets stuck in a loop

Okay I fixed it by clicking free trial and it said I already a 365 subscription so would I like to upgrade? It then let me buy..

Can anyone tell me if this sneaky upgrade still works?

Taken from the 2nd newest post in the Disqus comment section beneath this article on Paul Thurrott's website:

"LHpost • 17 days ago
Appears to work still in Sept 2015 -- I just stacked then converted, and it looks fine. Will verify that it still works after the first month, but it sure looks like it's good for the duration! Thanks so much for the tip."

Also I shall be attempting this myself for the second time this year in the next day or two so shall post back here if it still works! :wink:

Look forward to hearing how you get on. Thanks

Just bought a copy of the german liscence amazon.co.uk/Mic…nal so will test it out and see if the licence can be stacked tomorrow hopefully.

German copy works and allows you to download and use O365 as a UK user. Found £20 copies on ebay ebay.co.uk/itm…b18

Maximum is 5 years subscription per account. So if like me you stacked 5 together on one account will have to wait one month before attempting this upgrade.

hi all,
First post on here, but just thought is say that the above worked. I bought 3 codes from the previous post and upgraded without issue!

The microsoft will probably put a stop to this, too, much as they have sweepingly crippled the rest of their OneDrive cloud product today.

Can you expand on that comment? What have they done to OneDrive?

Google "Microsoft onedrive changes" and look at the results at the top.

They've basically backtracked on the "Unlimited" storage amounts and reduced most of the others.

lifehacker.com/mic…841?

blog.onedrive.com/one…es/

[Edit] - blog.onedrive.com/one…AQ/

With regards to one drive. You have to realise how expensive storage architecture can get. Though im miffed about their changes i do understand (i was an engineer for a cloud hoster only 5 months back). Google and other services could fill the gap and take the portion of the user base that deemed storage key to their needs.

Also the upgrade from personal to 5 users on home O365 worked. That's 5 users for 5 years for very little money. To quantify it, here are some sums.

In 5 years with the 60 minutes of free (i say free but you know) Skype minutes that's 18,000 minutes overall (12 months X 60 minutes X 5 Users).

5 users with access to the bulk of the office 2016 suite with cross licensing. For mac that's £100.24 per license and PC £99.99.

There is a bunch of other pros that more than make up for the loss of storage space. For me there's no real need for online storage. But its up to needs/ preference.

I would suggest people kick up a stink about it. But take it up with MS directly as a group.

End of the day it cost me £120.92 (£32.93 - German license + 4*£20 eBay license + £7.99 upgrade to home edition). That is £24.18 per user for 5 years or £4.84 per user per year. If you get lucky and grab some of the £20 eBay codes your costs go down more than mine did. £107.99 (5 packs plus the £7.99 upgrade fee). So for you that's ~ £21.60 per user over the course of 5 years or ~ £4.32 per user per year.

You'd also likely see the next generation of the Office suite also using this scheme (Office moves in whats known as waves 2013 was wave 15, 2016 is wave 16. Which puts Office 2019 as wave 17 tbr 2018).

The cost of storage hardware and managing it has not risen signifacantly that I aware of and any decent 5 year plan should have accounted for such variences so it was plainly a marketting plan to get additional users from the get go.

And i agree. They should get taken to task for it.

While I was disappointed to hear the cut in Office 365 OneDrive storage 1Tb is still plenty of storage and remember that's per user...so if you aren't using all your accounts you can always setup other MS IDs on the other accounts and then use new OneDrive Shared Folders to access that storage from your main account ;-)

As I'd actually just reached using 1.3TB on OneDrive apparently I will need to reduce my storage use sometime in the future "If you are an Office 365 consumer subscriber and have stored in excess of 1 TB, you will be notified of this change and will be able to keep your increased storage for at least 12 months."

Remember if you really did just get Office365 for just the storage then Microsoft will give you a refund "•If you are an Office 365 consumer subscriber and find that Office 365 no longer meets your needs, a pro-rated refund will be given. Click support.office.com/en-…=US to learn more."

To be honest it's the free users I feel really bad for as 15Gb + 15Gb Camera Roll down to only 5Gb going forwards which is going to be a big blocker to people bothering to use OneDrive as the centre of their cross platform digital life as Microsoft allegedly wanted to!

You'd think that clawing back 9TB or more from paid Office 365 users would have allowed them to keep giving 0.03TB to the free users?!

Guess we just have to hope that performance and features of OneDrive will improve to match or beat Dropbox etc, as they've just shot themselves in the foot from a space perspective!!

For reference the official Microsoft OneDrive post is at blog.onedrive.com/one…es/ with supplementary linked FAQ blog.onedrive.com/one…AQ/

Looks like Microsoft are back tracking a little on their OneDrive storage reductions: lifehacker.com/mic…500

Looks like Microsoft are back tracking a little on their OneDrive storage reductions: lifehacker.com/mic…500

Office 365 users have 1 year to get under 1Tb usage, but meantime well worth EVERYONE going to preview.onedrive.com/bonus/ before Jan 31st to lock in your free 15Gb + 15Gb photos backup...
Full story laid our well at windowscentral.com/one…age

Great, still works.
Also states subscription will last for 12 months at check out.
Thank you

hi all i wonder if i can ask for some help. I got the linx 10 a year ago which came with a years personal sub, that expired on the 24th december. Can i apply this trick to this. is it just as easy if i buy the subs off ebay and apply them to my account, ie stack them.
Also if i dont renew i'm currently using 54gb of my onedrive storage, im more concerned that MS reduced that if i dont renew my subscription.

Don’t forget, everyone, many Seagate drives on sale currently have the appropriate little blue rectangular sticker on it that describes their OneDrive offer of 200GB free for two years. It can’t stack (ie, two drives don’t give the same account twice that storage), but might be useful cloud storage for some, as a mild alternative to this.

If your current account is a 1 user Personal account then you 1st want to buy some cheap 1 User Personal Office 365 codes off eBay (up to a max of 4x), redeem those to push your 365 Personal expiry out 4 years, only then do you do this 1 month buy of 5x User Home to convert all those 4 years of Personal into Home for just 1x £7.99 (as long as you remember to turn auto renewal back off after)

If you don't want to both with that or already have an account upgraded to 5x User Home license then you can buy cheap 1x User Personal licenses on eBay and redeem those against your Home account. You will get 9x months of 5 User Home for each 12x month Personal you apply...which likely still works out a considerable saving than buying direct via MS website.

thanks for replying, currently talking to a USA seller that has some 365 subs for sale. tried the sellers in this thread and they are closed down and not selling.

just bought my personal subs and ive applied them and now shows upto 2019. just a quick question. my missus has one drive account, if i upgrade this to 5 users, will we both have to use the same onedrive account or can they have there own upto 1tb, my youngest daughter also has a windows hone so was hoping she could benefit of the 1tb ondedrive too but she has her own microsoft account.

Once you have upgraded your MS account to the 5x User Office 365 Home (following initial thread info steps) you can then invite any other 4x existing MS Accounts to share the Home plan. They all get their own individual existing OneDrive's upgraded to 1Tb OneDrive storage each, but you all share a total of 5x devices full PC/Mac Office suite installs & Skype callout minutes. But each get full unlimited use of Office Mobile apps when signed in anywhere.

just a quick question as i have no idea how these things work. after four years now its on the home plan you cant downgrade that to personal can you? would you have to set up a new personal account and therefore move everything from onedrive to the new account. thats the onyl thing putting me off doing it,

Just found this now and tried it but it didn't work. It now shows that I have paid my £7.99 to extend my subscription from jan 2016 to feb 2016.

Did you choose 1 month personal or 1 month home?

it still works as people are reporting it on other sites, you may have done something wrong

I can confirm that this still works as I have just turned 3 years of personal into 3 years of Home (plus a month)
jw021979

Fid you select the one month renewal or the one month? You need the renewal selection and also need to make sure that you are logged into the MS store with the same account that your personal licences sit in.

have just done this and can confirm it still seems to work.

Thanks to OP and wenttoabetterplace as still working - had a free Office 365 Personal subscription with my daughter's HP Stream; bought 3 more product keys from eBay for $87 (£63); got the £7.99 Home subscription and went through TopCashBack to get £6 back = a 5-user subscription until February 2020 for less than £65 - £1.32 a month!

Given it's coming up on a year since I posted this deal (and I only stupidly only took advantage of stacking 1 year, not max of 4) I was looking around for ways to keep my Office 365 at 5x Home license for cheapest possible.

Three options were:
1) Let my current subscription expire, then stack up with 1 User Personal codes then do this 1x Home monthly purchase trick to turn my sub back into 5 User Home.
2) Purchase 1 User Personal codes and just redeem them with still running 5 User Home license - where 1 Year of Personal will give you 9 months of 5 User Home - So still a good deal if you find cheap Personal codes
3) Purchase 5 User Home code as cheaply as possible

I personally didn't want to go through the extra hassle of expiry and then re-setup (particularly if it quickened the loss/into read only state, of my current 10Tb OneDrive which currently has 1.3Tb in it.) so looked around for prices of 1 User Personal vs 5 User Home on eBay etc.

For me personally I found an eBay seller of dtpsoft offering a 'MS Office 365 Home Premium 5 PC - 5 MAC - 1 Year Subscription' for £49.99 instead of MS official £79.99 + I had a 'come back to eBay' £20 for more than £30 spend personal email voucher so actually got it for only £29.99 :grin:

Hope that info helps any others that didn't stack much (or run out in the future) and need to extend their Office 365 licenses?

Just a word of warning. I also got this deal a year ago. It expired today, so I bought a 1 year personal to add to my home account thinking it would give me 9 months of home. Not so!!

It cancelled my home subscription and just gave me a personal one. Only after threatening to remove all my services from Microsoft (I have hosted Exchange too) did they relent and I managed to end up with 12 months home. But just thought would warn anyone else thinking of doing the above that certainly options 1 and 2 don't appear to work.

Confirmed, it still works. Thanks for posting this.

I can confirm that I've managed to add two Personal subscriptions and then purchased a monthly Home subscription, I've cancelled the auto renew and my subscription is still showing as Home. So in theory this is still working, but we'll have to see what happens in a months time when the Home subscription expires, will my account revert back to Personal

Got the freebie year personal sub from here recently, just upgraded to this for 7.99 thanks :smile:

Great deal

Awesome. Worked a treat. Thanks heaps.

A question for those of us that bought up 4 years when this first went live, can we still buy a cheap copy of Personal and convert it to Home to extend for another year?

I believe you either have the choice of:
1) Cashing in Personal account credits against your existing Home sub at a rate of each 12 months Personal code gets you a 9 month extension on Home

2) Or you will have to let you Home level subscription expire fully, then add 1-4yrs of Personal Sub credits, then you can do same (1 month payment for Home then cancel auto renew) to convert all your Personal credit into same length Home credit for 1x monthly Home cost.
The problem with option 2 is I don't know what exactly happens to your OneDrive storage and any associated Home accounts at the point your 365 sub fully expires...I would presume your OneDrive goes into Read Only mode due to being over your storage limit...but it's *possible* MS could delete stuff?

If anyone has done 2nd method to take advantage of this loophole a 2nd time what happened to your account when in expired? And then how much did you have to put back once you'd re-subscribed?

What happens at renewal? My 1 year home is about to expire - should I start again, buy 1 yr personal and switch to home then cancel?

Thank you very much! Just tried this. Seems to have worked great :-)

Anyone know if this still works ? :smile: