$50 a year is ridiculous for my uses. I don't need full Office (Word and Outlook are basically all I use), and I don't use or need cloud storage. I refuse to buy Microsoft's subscription type products. If they can't sell it to me at a one time price then I'm not buying it, as its only for my limited use (I'm retired and for personal home use only).
Of the E-mail programs I've tried, including Microsoft Live Mail, Thunderbird is winning. Thunderbird even imported all my Outlook folders and address book automatically. Everything in Microsoft Live Mail is manual, it won't automatically import (Like Outlook 2003 automatically imported my Outlook Express data when I installed Office 2003).