This is just the official price. Of course, you'll almost always get free Win 11 Home with new computers, or a Volume License for 10€ from ebay, or you just don't activate it. But the official price by M$ is 259€/200$. Which kinda means they think it is worth that much, and it would be justified to charge germans almost 300 USD for "an advertisement delivery platform strapped to a program loader".
Or just install w/o a license key and deal with the watermark (I assume it's the same as w/ Win 10). That's what I did since I primarily use Linux and only use Windows to test random stuff.
I only use Windows in a VM, and never activated it, ever, but my point is that M$ officially thinks that their "advertisement delivery platform strapped to a program loader" is worth 259.00€.
This is just the official price. Of course, you'll almost always get free Win 11 Home with new computers, or a Volume License for 10€ from ebay, or you just don't activate it. But the official price by M$ is 259€/200$. Which kinda means they think it is worth that much, and it would be justified to charge germans almost 300 USD for "an advertisement delivery platform strapped to a program loader".
Fair enough. Just always seemed like a weird repeated sticking point.
For anyone looking to buy it cheaper, look for OEM key resellers. It's the discounted price for companies preinstalling Windows. You can only install it on one device though, instead of whatever "multiple install grace window" they allow normally.
For anyone wanting it for free, MASgrave utilizes some sort of loophole with an official licensing method meant for corporations to get Microsoft to grant you a valid official license key for free. Microsoft can't go back and somehow differentiate these keys from paid legit ones, so there's no risk. Just make sure you're getting MASgrave from their official source on github so there isn't any malware snuck in. It also has some functionality for Office licenses as well.
Also worth noting that with effort, you can excise the overwhelming majority of the anti-consumer bullshit from Windows. Not really accessible to the average joe though, real easy to break shit or not disable things properly so they get re-enabled through updates.
Normies don't know what an OS is. I'd say there is not a single person that would actually pay the official price - but it's nonetheless what M$ is asking for, implicating that's what they think their Trojan is worth.