Microsoft shrinks 365 Family and Premium to a shared 2TB OneDrive pool

A household that bought Microsoft 365 Family to back up six people's phones and a couple of laptops sits in the awkward middle of this. Each of those accounts carries its own terabyte today, so a plan with all five shared slots filled holds 6TB ^[2]. After the switch the household shares one 2TB pool, each person's files still private but counted against the same total ^[3]. That is a third of the old ceiling, a cut of 4TB ^[12].

The pool is smaller than the old total, and the gap is for sale by the terabyte. Each extra terabyte adds $10 a month to the $130-a-year base, which already works out to a little over $10 a month ^[9][8]. A family that keeps 4TB would buy two add-on terabytes, pushing a bill near $11 a month to about $31 ^[13]. ZDNET put it as doubling or tripling the cost for anyone storing more than roughly half their old allowance ^[4].

ZDNET points to the users this is built to stop: people who added a second free Microsoft account to a spare slot, filled its terabyte, and shared it back into their main account to assemble a private hoard ^[15]. One pool closes that route. It also catches the family that never gamed anything and simply kept photos across five separate accounts.

Microsoft has pulled OneDrive storage back before. In 2014 it offered Office 365 subscribers "unlimited" storage, then withdrew the offer a year later ^[10]. It blamed heavy users at the time, saying a small number of them had backed up numerous PCs and stored entire movie collections and DVR recordings, in some instances exceeding 75 TB per user, or 14,000 times the average ^[11].

Before the renewal, the comparison that counts is add-on storage against the new Pro tier. On storage alone the add-ons win: reaching Pro's 5TB with Family add-ons runs about $41 a month, against Pro's $100 ^[14][7]. The $100 is priced for Pro's higher AI usage limits, and the same 5TB costs less on Family.