A few months ago, Professor Przemyslaw Dera had a presentation due. The data was ready and the slides were built. When he sat down at his desk at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Geophysics and Planetology to pull it all together, his screen stopped him.

Microsoft Office had locked him out. His free access was gone.

“My PowerPoint didn’t work,” he said. “It told me it was no longer free.”

Microsoft had ended its free education license for Office 365 — the arrangement that had given anyone with a .edu email address access to Word, Excel, PowerPoint and more at no cost. For years, Dera’s lab of roughly ten researchers, PhD students, and undergraduates had relied on it across 20 to 30 computers. With the license gone, the cost was not negligible.

“It’s probably about $100 a computer,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like too much. But you pay it per year, times 30, it’s some thousands of dollars.”

The University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa weighed taking on an institutional license that would have covered all students and staff, but decided the cost was too high. That left faculty like Dera — and roughly 20,000 students — to navigate the shift on their own.

His story is not unique. Across campus, from research labs to digital studios, the same pressure is being felt in different forms. The tools students and faculty once took for granted are quietly becoming line items on a monthly bill and the people who can’t pay are being left behind.

The days of big tech subsidizing campus software are coming to an end. Some UH Mānoa faculty, staff and students are finding workarounds. Others are just paying. One by one, the software licenses that universities received free from tech giants are disappearing, replaced by subscription models designed to generate recurring revenue. What was once a perk of a .edu email address now comes with a monthly bill, and institutions, departments, and individual students are being left to figure out the best alternative.

According to a 2025 Zuora report, 78% of adults worldwide now hold at least one paid subscription. The global subscription economy reached $536 billion in 2025 and is projected to hit $859 billion in 2026, according to Fortune Business Insights. For everyday people, the subscription economy has created a new kind of financial struggle. A streaming service here, a cloud storage plan there, a software license, a news site, a fitness app; each charge is small enough to ignore, but together they add up to a bill most people never consciously agreed to pay. 

The era of paying once and owning software forever has not just faded; it has been replaced by a system most people are paying into without fully realizing it.

A C+R Research study found that the average American spends $219 per month on subscriptions across 8.2 active services, but estimates they spend only $86. That $133 gap is not a matter of carelessness. It is a structural feature of how subscriptions are designed: small recurring charges on autopilot, spread across multiple payment methods, billed on different dates, renewed without friction and forgotten just as easily.

“For companies that offer these services or tools, it’s a much better model,” said Dera, who also serves as director of the Hawaiʻi Institute of Materials Research. “Once you get used to it, you pay them regularly rather than just one time. It’s recurring revenue rather than a one-time sale.”

Brad Christ, Vice President for IT and Chief Information Officer at the University of Hawaiʻi System, pointed to a concept called “platform decay” to describe what happens when a platform gets objectively worse for free users in the pursuit of profitability. For a long time, he explained, tech companies provided heavily subsidized services to build their customer bases and achieve market dominance. Those subsidies have largely vanished.

“Whether it is Google, Microsoft, Netflix, or others, companies are raising prices to achieve, sustain, or improve profitability,” Christ said. “UH is not alone in this. These changes are something every higher education institution is facing.”

Microsoft retired its unmanaged Office 365 services at the end of 2025. UH ITS deprovisioned all accounts in the affected domain in November of that year and has since directed users toward Google@UH — Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides as replacements for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, with Google Drive replacing OneDrive and Google Meet replacing Teams.

But Google’s own model has shifted too. The College of Social Sciences Digital Studio, a student-run space that produces photos, videos, and graphics for the university, found itself caught when Google quietly ended its unlimited Drive storage for educational accounts. Years of accumulated media files suddenly had nowhere to go.

Erin Fujitani, a graduate student assistant at the College of Social Science Digital Studio, spent an entire summer reorganizing five years of files and migrating everything into a newly allocated shared drive folder the studio had to formally request from the university.

“As we are always producing and sharing photos, videos, graphics, these take up a lot of drive space,” Fujitani said. “We had to request the university to grant the studio account special unlimited access.”

Meanwhile, a more significant change is quietly in the works on the Microsoft front. Christ confirmed that UH ITS has built the infrastructure to provide all current students, faculty, and staff with access to the web-based version of Microsoft 365. A formal announcement, he said, is coming soon.

Christ acknowledged there is no single solution that fits everyone. “There is no one-size-fits-all,” he said, “and we don’t expect there to be one.” The challenge for a university system the size of UH is that every decision about software access ripples across tens of thousands of people with different needs, different budgets, and different levels of technical flexibility. A solution that works for a graduate researcher in a science lab may be unworkable for a student in a creative program. A tool affordable at the system level may be out of reach for a single department. And a free alternative that satisfies 90% of users leaves the remaining 10% without recourse. ITS must weigh cost, security, equity, and institutional strategy simultaneously, often with budgets that do not reflect the pace at which the digital landscape is changing. 

He compared holding on to aging technology out of habit or cost concerns to a familiar risk. The consequences of doing nothing are not abstract. Software that goes outdated becomes a security liability. Licenses that lapse mid-semester can lock researchers out of years of work with no warning. Incompatible file formats can strand entire projects when collaborators on different systems cannot open each other’s documents. And for institutions that delay the transition, the eventual cost of catching up on lost data, emergency licensing fees, and staff hours spent on crisis management often far exceeds what a proactive solution would have cost. 

For faculty and students, the stakes are even more personal. A locked PowerPoint the morning of a client presentation, a summer spent reorganizing five years of files, a subscription fee standing between a student and the tools their program requires — these are not hypothetical risks. They are already happening at UH Mānoa. 

“Using an old computer is like driving a car with bald tires,” he said. “Will it still drive? Yes. But is it safe? No.”

Faced with higher costs, some faculty have found a way out. Dera turned to LibreOffice — a free, open-source suite with equivalents for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access — and installed it across his lab computers. The transition was smoother than he expected.

“I would say 90% of functionality I need from Office tools is in the LibreOffice package,” he said. “I was so impressed.” 

Compatibility, the obstacle most people fear, turned out not to be a problem, “I have no problems opening Word documents or saving Word documents.”

The switch prompted him to look harder at other costs. The next target was EndNote, a reference management tool priced at around $200 per license. His students had been pushing him toward Zotero, a free alternative, for some time. He had resisted. Then he tried it himself.

“I tried Zotero and I like it better than the commercial option,” he said. “These two things we have for free. And it works.”

But the free-tool playbook has limits. At the Digital Studio, those limits become visible.

Students in the studio are required to have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription to access Photoshop and Premiere Pro. The full suite runs $69.99 per month, with a student discount bringing it to $19.99. For students who cannot afford even the discounted rate, that is a barrier to participation.

Fujitani said there is no alternative being considered. “Almost all professional outlets utilize Adobe,” she said. “We strive to prepare our students to work in the industry post-grad. Students having Adobe knowledge to put on their resume is a big bonus.”

The pressure is not unique to Hawaiʻi. Globally, the subscription economy is expanding fastest into regions where it hits hardest. What feels like a manageable monthly fee in San Francisco can represent a significant barrier in Casablanca or Manila.

Dera does not blame UH Mānoa for opting out of the institutional Microsoft license. The question of who bears responsibility does not have a clean answer. Tech companies argue they are simply responding to market forces, that years of subsidized access were never sustainable, and that charging for tools is just business. Universities argue they are caught between competing obligations, forced to make impossible choices with finite budgets. 

Students, meanwhile, are rarely part of the conversation at all. They arrive on campus assuming access, discover the gaps on their own, and are left to absorb costs that were never disclosed in any tuition breakdown. The subscription economy has created a system where responsibility is so fragmented that no single actor feels accountable, yet the consequences are concrete enough that someone always ends up paying. 

More often than not, that someone is the person who can least afford it. 

“Universities always have choices between saving money for financial support for students or investing in infrastructure,” he said. “I don’t blame them for that.” 

The Microsoft decision may also set a precedent. As more software vendors follow the same path, universities like UH will face the same calculation again and again. Each time, the choice will be familiar: absorb the cost at the institutional level, distribute it to departments and individuals, or find a free alternative that meets enough needs to be workable. There are no easy answers, and no single decision will satisfy everyone. But how institutions respond to these moments shapes expectations for faculty planning their lab budgets, for students choosing their tools, and for departments trying to anticipate what comes next.  

The ITS decision, however understandable, left an entire campus to absorb a cost that was once invisible.

Christ sees the shift as structural and permanent. For universities, adapting to this reality requires a fundamental shift in how they think about digital infrastructure. For decades, software and technology were treated as capital investments, one-time purchases that appeared on a balance sheet and depreciated over time, much like a building or a piece of laboratory equipment. That model no longer reflects how technology works. Today, access to essential digital tools is an ongoing operating expense, renewable annually, subject to price increases, and revocable at any time by the vendor. 

“Inevitably, it means making choices regarding our investments,” he said. “For universities, that means constantly deciding which tools are essential enough to fund at the system level, which can be left to colleges or departments, and which must be left to individuals to sort out on their own.”

For Dera, the forced change became an unexpected lesson. His lab now runs partly on free software, and he has been encouraging his students to explore the same. For the Digital Studio, the reasoning is different, tied not to preference but to the demands of an industry that has already made its choice.

The digital world was never a stable place, and it never will be. It moves faster with every passing year and those who cannot keep up, financially or otherwise, get left behind. The subscription model is just the latest chapter of this industry. 

“It’s just a reality,” Dera said, “that you have to face.”