I’m absolutely blown away by Microsoft’s University pricing option for Office. Here’s what it is.

You need a .edu email address to qualify. It costs a single $79.99 fee, and for that you get the following for four years:

You get full versions of most of the Microsoft Office suite — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, Access. With the first four, you’ve already met the office productivity needs of virtually everyone working outside of an enterprise setting. On top of that, you get the latest updates to those programs for the full four years. If Microsoft releases Office 2015 next year, you’ll get those updates for free. You can also download on-demand versions of Office programs on any computer with an internet connection that let you use the full functionality of Office on computers that you don’t own. The Office Web Apps also provide a decent subset of this functionality. 

Let’s stop here for a second and consider the value. Office is one of the most essential pieces of software for anyone. There are alternatives, of course. LibreOffice/OpenOffice are decent substitutes for people who don’t mind the lackluster interfaces. Google Drive provides alternatives for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint that are pretty good, but editing with them is harder than using Office and their feature set is limited. I’ve tried to replace Office for years and have always failed in the end. I, and most people in the world, would be willing to pay hundreds for Office alone.

But we’re just getting started.

For the last few years, Office has been tied pretty tightly to OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), Microsoft’s Dropbox alternative that supports file backup and mirroring across devices, cloud access, and collaborative online editing. The collaborative part isn’t nearly as seamless as Google Drive, but it does work well. And you can always pop over to Google Drive for your collaborative documents. 

Up until this month, Office 365 University customers were allowed 20GB extra storage space on OneDrive, up from the 7GB given to free users. That was already a lot of space, but now that total has been increased to a 1TB. Most Office 365 plans will now come with 1TB of OneDrive space for the duration of the subscription. Just think about that. What was once $80 for four years of Microsoft Office now gets you 1TB of cloud storage for whatever you’d like for that time as well. There isn’t a cloud storage company on earth that currently comes close to that price with the access speeds and feature set that OneDrive has.

Some other odds and ends: you get 60 Skype world minutes per month to 60+ countries; tech support is free; and Office programs can be installed on 2 computers (and used on others via Office On Demand and Office Web Apps).

I bought Office 365 University back in December, and I’ve always thought it was a great value. I hate paying for software, so I always try to use alternatives, but Office was one that I always kept coming back to. I hate software subscriptions even more. But $80 for 4 years of use and free updates is absolutely a great deal for one of the most popular pieces of software in the world. In the software world, it’s way out of the norm. Adobe Creative Suite used to cost on the order of $5000, and now Creative Cloud costs $50 per month. Sublime Text costs $70 for a single license, if you want to get it out of shareware mode. The idea of getting a software suite this large for about 60¢ per month is fantastic. The idea of getting that and what amounts to a terabyte Dropbox folder is absolutely astonishing.

And that’s why Office 365 University is the best deal in software.