Looking for a cheap Office key<\/strong> that is also legal? The publisher’s price is not the only lawful price on the market. Since the UsedSoft v Oracle<\/strong> judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union (case C-128\/11, 3 July 2012), the first sale of a perpetual license in the European Economic Area exhausts the publisher’s distribution right. In practice, an organization that has paid for its licenses may resell them, even as downloads, as long as it stops using them itself. This mechanism, and this mechanism alone, feeds the second-hand software market.<\/p>\n The sources are ordinary: mergers and acquisitions, site closures, downsizing, a switch to subscriptions, fleets of computers that were oversized at the time of purchase. These dormant licenses are bought back, checked, then put back into circulation. A cheap Office key is therefore neither a counterfeit, nor a trial version, nor cut-down software: it is the same installation package signed by Microsoft, activated by a genuine key released by its previous owner.<\/p>\n The price depends mainly on the version and on the second-hand supply available for it. Here are the current benchmarks for a single-PC license, with the security update status that matters just as much as the price.<\/p>\nWhat budget should you plan for in 2026?<\/h2>\n