Windows 10 Home official pricing increased

Oct 8, 2018 06:40 GMT  ·  By

This news certainly lands at the worst possible time. A few hours after Microsoft pulled Windows 10 October 2018 Update due to a bug that causes the removal of user files, it was discovered that the company silently increased the price of the Home SKU of its operating system.

While an official announcement on this wasn’t provided, the official Microsoft website now indicates that Windows 10 Home costs $139 in the United States.

The original price of the Home SKU was $119.99, and it’s not known why Microsoft decided to make this OS version more expensive.

The Pro version continues to be sold for $199.99, which is the same pricing that Microsoft used when it launched the operating system back in July 2015.

Free Windows 10 upgrades

While Windows 10 Home is now more expensive, Microsoft actually offered the operating system free of charge to users running Windows 7 and 8.1 in the first 12 months after launch.

The free upgrade promo allowed users of earlier Windows versions to move to Windows 10 without paying for a license, technically helping the adoption of the new OS release increase faster.

Furthermore, despite the upgrade campaign coming to an end a year after the launch of Windows 10, a loophole that enabled devices with accessibility features to install the OS free of charge remained available for nearly six more months.

All feature updates for Windows 10, including here the recently-released October 2018 Update, are completely free and they can be installed on any device that has already been upgraded to Windows 10.

The aforementioned pricing is available for the digital version of Windows 10, which can be downloaded from the official Microsoft page and then installed on compatible systems. Microsoft’s also selling USB drives with Windows 10, but these are out of stock for both the Home and Pro SKUs.

Via MSPU