Microsoft stopped supporting Windows 10 in October 2025. Plenty of firms around here didn't replace those machines — they enrolled them in Microsoft's paid security update program and moved on.
Here's the part nobody put on the calendar: that program runs $61 per device for year one, and Microsoft doubles the price every consecutive year after. Year two is $122 a machine. Year three is $244.
For a 20-person law firm still running older hardware, a line item that looked like a rounding error turns into real money — and it buys you nothing but patches on a computer you're going to replace anyway.
This is what I mean by the hidden cost of running IT in-house. It's almost never the help desk ticket. It's the renewal nobody tracked, the price that quietly escalated, the hardware refresh plan that never got written.
Exchange Web Services is the next one. Microsoft begins switching it off across all tenants next month, and fully disables it in April 2027. Firms find out when a practice management or document tool stops syncing email — usually mid-deadline.
None of this is an emergency today. All of it is expensive when it surprises you.
If nobody at your firm owns a hardware refresh calendar and a list of what plugs into your email, that's the gap. Worth sorting out before your next renewal.
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