Are those $50 “lifetime license” deals for Microsoft Office legit?

Welcome to the gray market. Do you feel lucky?

You’ve probably seen this pitch, which shows up regularly at your favorite social media hangouts and on some very well known, high-traffic tech websites.

Get a lifetime license for Microsoft Office Professional 2021 - $49.95

Hurry - offer ends in 4 days!

If you are a thrifty person who owns a PC or Mac, you might be tempted by this offer. But if you are experienced enough to know what a scam looks like, you are probably wondering: How can this offer possibly be legit?

After all, when something looks too good to be true, well, you know ...

And make no mistake about it, this offer is definitely too good to be true.

Office Professional 2021 is one of only three Office 2021 perpetual-license products that Microsoft sells through retail channels. (The others are Office Home & Student 2021 and Office Home & Business 2021.) And these packages are not cheap. If you purchase directly from Microsoft, the Office Professional package costs $439.99. See for yourself:

You can save 10 bucks or so by purchasing this package from a Microsoft partner. But you won’t find a better deal than that. Microsoft perpetual-license products are rarely discounted.

So, how are these sellers able to cut the price by nearly 90% compared to what Microsoft and its partners charge? And do they deliver what’s promised?

Read on for the details. But here’s the tl;dr:

Don’t be fooled by the wording. You are not buying a license for Office. Instead, you’re buying a product key that allows you to download the Office desktop software from Microsoft’s website. The software will probably activate and work just like a copy of Office purchased directly from Microsoft. But the seller is not authorized to distribute these product keys, which means Microsoft can revoke your activation anytime. And there are multiple credible reports from people who’ve been deactivated months after installing this software. So ... do you feel lucky?

What you see is not what you get

Last year, for research purposes, I ordered one of those deeply discounted “lifetime licenses,” from a company called StackSocial (a division of StackCommerce), for the too-good-to-be-true price of $64.99. What did I get in return?

After signing up for a StackSocial account and completing the payment, I was taken to a page with a Claim My Code button. Clicking that button took me to a page with a product key and instructions for downloading the Office Setup program from Microsoft’s site.

The disclaimer at the top of that box was a little disconcerting. I mean, it is always just a little suspicious when you’ve just made a purchase and the seller tries to reassure you by insisting “This is not a scam.”

KINDLY NOTE: You may experience receiving a ‘used key’ upon redemption of your purchase. This is not a scam, but rather a glitch in the system that is causing you to see this error message. Rest assured, we will promptly issue a new key or refund to meet your full satisfaction. [emphasis added]

That link had helpfully entered the product key for me. When I clicked the big green Redemption Link button, I was taken to an official Microsoft page where I signed in with my Microsoft account. The resulting dialog confirmed my product key as belonging to Office Professional Plus 2021.

Wait ... what?

The page where I placed this order insisted that I was purchasing a license for Office Professional 2021. Despite the similarity in name, Office Professional Plus 2021 is not the same product. It is sold only as a volume license product and has to be purchased from a Microsoft partner. It is never available for retail purchase.

Here is the official documentation that shows this version is a Volume License product only: Update history for Office LTSC 2021 and Office 2021 - Office release notes. And here’s a second official page that includes a link for licensing options: Compare Microsoft Office Volume Licensing Suites.

And a quick aside: Those pages talk about Office LTSC 2021. The acronym stands for Long Term Support Channel, which is Microsoft’s way of positioning these products for people who are perfectly happy never upgrading.

It worked! (For now, at least)

This is a Click-To-Run installation, meaning the files are downloaded automatically using the same installer technology that Microsoft 365 subscriptions use. And the product key is only required once, as part of the initial setup. After that, as we’ll see shortly, the product is attached to the Microsoft account you used to redeem the key.

When I installed those Office desktop apps last year, I had no problem with activation. In theory, that activation allows me to use it in perpetuity on the device where I originally installed it. I can reinstall it on that device as well. All I have to do is sign in with my Microsoft account at https://account.microsoft.com/services, where there’s a record of my purchase and an Install link.

Because this is a “one PC, one user” product, it shouldn’t be possible to reinstall this suite on a different PC from the original. However, I was able to install this copy of Office Professional Plus on another PC, despite the pesky one-PC rule. As I’ve observed through many years of writing about Windows and Office licensing and activation, Microsoft’s activation policies are generally tilted in favor of the customer. Because it’s been nearly a year since that initial installation, the activation servers decided that I had probably replaced my original PC and wasn’t trying to pirate the software. When I tried installing it on a second PC, however, I was told in no uncertain terms that that was not allowed.

Where are these product keys coming from?

Let’s make something clear right up front: If you pay for one of these offers, you are not buying a license. This outfit is selling “gray market” product keys that are harvested from a variety of sources and aren’t authorized for resale. (Some Visual Studio subscriptions, for example, come with a passel of license keys intended for evaluation purposes. And it would be trivially easy for an ethically challenged IT person in a large corporation to copy some unused license keys and sell them to someone who would in turn resell them on one of these e-commerce sites.)

I repeat: If you buy one of these product keys, you don’t have a valid license, as far as Microsoft is concerned. But the software should work as expected, and if you aren’t bothered about the technical details of license agreements then that might be all that matters to you.

You probably wouldn’t consider giving your credit card information to a shady-looking website, which is why this particular offer is so interesting. StackCommerce acts as a broker between well-known publishers and unknown sellers. In this case, the actual seller goes by the name “nerdused,” but lately I’ve seen identical offers from a company called “Definitive Lab.”

Because the deal is offered under the imprimatur of a trusted publisher, often with a by-lined article from the publication’s “deals editor,” you’re much more likely to trust it. I’ve seen these offers on some very big sites, names you would recognize instantly. StackCommerce and their publisher partners get a generous cut of each sale, and in a media marketplace where publishers are struggling to find revenue, it’s an irresistible pitch.

(If you’re really intent on doing this, by the way, you can track down one of these product key resellers directly, cutting out the publisher and the e-commerce intermediary and chopping the price in half. No fancy Google fu required.)

What could go wrong?

Are you the glass-half-full type? If so, you could look at my experience and say, “It’ll probably work, so what do I have to lose?” I might try to talk you out of that if you’re trying to buy software for your business, especially if you have any disgruntled former employees who might call Microsoft’s piracy hotline and rat you out. Trust me: You do not want to be the defendant in a civil suit with Microsoft alleging that you’re using improperly licensed software.

But on a personal PC or Mac, the risk that the Microsoft License Police will show up at your door is about as close to zero as it gets.

The glass-half-empty types in the audience know that Microsoft can revoke your activation rights at any time. Do you feel lucky? It’s possible these products will work forever. Microsoft might decide that it’s not worth cracking down on small-fry customers who bought a product in good faith. But they can revoke those keys and have been known to do so, sometimes months after they were originally activated.

And that’s not just a theoretical risk. I’ve seen multiple credible reports from people who purchased one of these product keys and then found their product deactivated just a few months later.

The bigger objection, as far as I’m concerned, is that these licenses are intended to be installed on one PC, for use by one person. If you buy a new PC or Mac, you might be able to transfer the activation, but there’s a very good chance that you won’t be able to do that. That’s where a Microsoft 365 subscription shines: It can be installed on up to 10 PCs or Macs, and if you hit the maximum number of installs it’s trivially easy to deactivate an installation so that you can use the software on a different device. You also get a terabyte of OneDrive storage with each subscription, which is not the case with a perpetual-license Office version.

Researching this story brought back one memory from the dawn of the PC era, well before Windows existed. In those days, a copy of the most important software app of its day, Lotus 1-2-3, cost $495. (Adjusted for inflation, that mid-1980s price tag would be well over $1200 in 2023. Yikes! And it was copy-protected!) But on the backstreets of Hong Kong, I found pirated copies of that program, complete with fancy manuals and no copy protection, for a mere $20.

Some things never change.