Mac users who cringe at having to pay recurring bills or want a straightforward lifetime solution have an excellent opportunity. A lifetime license for Microsoft Office Home and Business 2021 for Mac is now available for $59.97, about three times less than its regular $219 price. Successful purchasers will obtain the full suite of productivity essentials for one computer.
What You Get in This One-Time Purchase for Mac
This lifelong license comes with six primary Microsoft applications built for macOS: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and OneNote. It’s the software suite that most offices rely on, packaged for offline use and housed within your Mac.
Excel 2021 on Mac includes XLOOKUP, dynamic ranges, and LET, which reduce complex equations and increase model visibility. PowerPoint introduces Morph and improved Presenter Coach outcomes for seamless presentation effects. Outlook consolidates the user interface and offers strong search capabilities. Word’s in-document modifying and commenting functionality for DOCX files underscores collaboration.
Teams for Mac includes chat and conferences, as well as more sophisticated options that may require a Microsoft organization or personal account. OneNote is still a useful notebook for research, courses, and project management on various devices.
Why a Perpetual License Appeals to Mac Users
For many, the math is simple. Microsoft 365 Personal costs about $69.99 per year, and the Family plan is approximately $99.99 per year. Against a $59.97 one-time purchase, the break-even point for individual users who do not need the cloud extras occurs in well under a year. The savings could be considerable over a few years for students, freelancers, and small-business owners who want to keep tabs on software overhead.
A perpetual license also offers you more access. Because the apps are installed locally, you can work even without an internet connection—essential for travel, fieldwork, or any environment with poor Wi-Fi. Your files are stored on your Mac by default, giving some professionals a sense of security and compliance.
Key differences compared to Microsoft 365
Understand what you don’t have:
- Office 2021 does not offer continuous new feature releases, substantial OneDrive cloud storage budget, or recent AI-powered capabilities like Copilot, unlike Microsoft 365.
- Office 2021 is expected to receive mainstream support until October 2026, according to Microsoft’s product lifecycle support.
- This means it will stop receiving feature releases and only receive standard support in the form of bug fixes and security updates.
- If you use cloud-first collaboration, real-time co-authoring at scale, or commercial email and storage, the subscription still provides the most integrated toolkit.
If your workflow requires a lot of online collaboration, advanced SharePoint, cloud automation, or AI-driven drafting, the subscription is a better long-term solution.
However, he adds, “If you or your teams are fed up with the constant need to master a new collaboration app; your Outlook for macOS is full of extra email accounts; computer RAM is stretched to the limit by gigantic Slack workspaces and an AI training model; or if you just want to own a version of Office that doesn’t run at someone else’s whim, the 2021 suite, a ‘static’ version of Office, will still do the trick.”
At $59.97, a lifetime license to Microsoft Office Home and Business 2021 for Mac makes a strong case to understand the basics once and avoid another bill. These fundamentals include the core applications that professionals rely upon, smooth performance on up-to-date Macs, and a relatively firm guarantee of ownership. As with any software purchase, it is critical to ensure that the vendor is legitimate and that prices are subject to change. However, if you are ready to own rather than rent your office suite, this is one of the simplest ways to make a one-time purchase.