Is Windows 11 Pro coming up for sale at a low price?
Is Windows 11 Pro coming up for sale at a low price?
When I searched before, people keep telling me that keys are just stolen goods. Is that right? I checked if selling them is illegal and most sites say no. I don't know the price for Windows 11 Pro or Education or Enterprise, or how many keys come with a volume license. I see someone making money by just giving out their extra keys. How many keys are in one batch of Windows 11? What does it cost to get them? Is it safe to buy from random websites? Who should I trust? One site also says you should pay more for online activation at
Volume Licensing is just sold by Microsoft. You should talk to them directly. The number of keys you get depends on your deal and how much money you pay. If you have a business and buy one thousand, you will pay less per key than if you only bought twenty. One person licenses usually cost about $100 for Windows 11 Home.
If someone is selling software keys to the same price that Microsoft itself charges, they are doing something wrong or shady. As a regular customer, you cannot buy an Enterprise license because those require special approval. You also can't buy an Educational license unless you are actually a teacher or student from a school that Microsoft officially accepts.
Do you think those websites are so good at getting things really low that people buy them for the price? Is there a secret spot in Microsoft where everything is super cheap?
And they might not be \"stolen keys\", but rather keys bought using stolen credit cards. That is money laundering. If you can get 100 stolen and valid credit card accounts for just $100, how do you end up with real cash? You cannot go to a store and buy stuff to sell... there are records and cameras. You cannot buy things that arrive in the mail. There has to be a paper trail and an actual address. So instead of buying digital goods that only use a temporary email address, you buy valid software licenses at regular stores without using your own cards. You don't care because they aren't yours now. Then you can sell those licenses for $20 each. Software, games, CAD programs, Photoshop, whatever. Buy 1,000 of them and sell them all for $20. That turns your $100 investment into $20,000 money straight from the washing machine. Now... when the real owner of those credit cards gets mad and says the charge was fraudulent, Microsoft might cancel any licenses bought with it. But you? You have no license anymore. The middle man, our thief who used stolen cards, is long gone.
you need to see if this company is real or fake. take this website and check who owns it. the owner lives in Toronto, Ontario, not California. so even though the address says California, it's actually a different place. you should look up www.whois.com Kinguin - Crunchbase Company Profile & Funding edit: I just looked at a key for $28 and found out that the company costs about 1.58 dollars a month to host their site. It's really easy to sell keys without owning them, but this number is only used to call people with a pay-per-call service. guess my last post was deleted because I tried to explain what happens when you block activation.
It's a breach of contract. When you buy volume license keys from Microsoft, there are rules that say you can only use them on company computers. If someone uses a key off their own machine or just in the air without it being plugged into real hardware, they are breaking that deal, and Microsoft can sue them. I see why Kinguin might get angry when they buy back excess keys from companies who don't need them anymore. It doesn't make sense to buy so many unused keys right away because those licenses are usually tied only to specific company equipment. Even then, you just use the license for that exact computer with the parts you bought. It would be silly to spend money on a bunch of unused keys first. The only way they have leftover keys is if Microsoft used a volume licensing program, but again, those keys are locked to company assets and can't be shared. Of course, some companies might not care about Microsoft or maybe they worry more about other things right now. But I'm sure it's easier for Microsoft to take action against people who use their stolen keys than it is to stop them from buying in the first place.
Big companies buy computer systems that don't come with an operating system installed. They use a special business license instead. So yes, they aren't making their own computers, but they often change the software vendor later too. Sometimes vendors won't even sell you a system without an OS if it's for a direct purchase. At my old company, we got a "OEM" (Original Equipment Manufacturer) license for Windows Pro for every machine we bought. Even though our team installed our official enterprise image during the setup process. We actually wasted about 65,000 Windows licenses in total. We never used those keys or anything with them. But there are some shady people who take those OEM keys and resell them illegally. That's against the rules for that specific software because the license was only meant for official hardware bought directly from a manufacturer.
Also, MSDN and TechNet licenses used to exist. I had a TechNet license before Microsoft shut it down. It started at $300, then dropped to $200 per year. You could get 10 or even 20 copies of every OS version going back all the way to DOS 3. That included Windows 8 Pro and Enterprise, and all versions from Win 7 Home through Ultimate. These were only for internal testing inside your own development environment. They weren't meant to be sold to others. But here is the catch: $300 upfront plus a couple hundred activation costs means you'd actually lose money if you try to sell them. At $25 per key, it's not worth selling. Microsoft knows that the same license key works in Boston or Budapest, but it won't work for your company because the key isn't tied to your internal setup. Basically, Poof! It gets disabled.
Some colleagues kept their MSDN/Technet keys for home computers instead of using ours. I told the last three holders that our licenses were ending. They probably didn't know we had an agreement about keeping things true up, so they were getting paid twice anyway. It's always fun to find old servers with rogue copies of Windows running. People tend to keep those systems around just in case something breaks. You can spin them back on for a quick fix and then leave them sitting idle for years until you need them again.