By Tashreef Shareef
Publication Date: 2026-05-08 13:30:00
At the start of this year, I stopped paying for Microsoft 365. My reason for dropping the subscription was simple: I wasn’t using it to its fullest, and over the years, I had found better alternatives for most of what it offered. For instance, I replaced Word with Obsidian as my default writing app, and I hadn’t opened Word in months.
Microsoft 365 isn’t the only paid service I’ve cut from my workflow. Over the past year or so, I’ve also replaced the rest of the Office suite, OneDrive, and Outlook with free, open-source apps that do the same job without the recurring bill. Here are the four Microsoft services I no longer pay for, and the open-source tools I now use instead.
Obsidian
A free, markdown-first replacement for Word
If you mostly use Word for writing and quick syncing across devices, Obsidian is hard to beat. It’s not technically open source,…