Software

Office, Windows and antivirus, owned once or rented by the year:

that split decides what a licence is worth to the next person. Office Home 2024 is paid for once and keeps working, but it is the home edition; Home & Business adds Outlook and is the one licensed for work. Microsoft 365 Personal and Family are yearly subscriptions with a terabyte of OneDrive per person, and Adobe’s Creative Cloud is sold only that way. CorelDRAW still sells both, which is why sign shops keep older versions running for years. Antivirus such as ESET NOD32 or Kaspersky is sold by the year and by the number of devices, so a card for one PC will not cover the family laptop as well. Windows nearly always arrives with the machine, and many laptops sold in Latin America carry Windows 11 Home Single Language, which cannot change its display language without a retail Home licence; check the edition before buying from laptops. Games, with their own accounts and stores, live in video games and consoles.

Point-of-sale and accounting software with FEL built in:

Guatemalan packages for tills, inventory and accounting mostly come as monthly cloud plans in quetzales with electronic invoicing included, so there is little to resell. Older desktop accounting packages come up when a business closes or changes system. Before paying for one, ask the developer whether they will move the licence to a new owner and still update it; a local package nobody supports is only useful for opening old files.

Office Home 2024 at Q1,200 and the Q50 “lifetime” Pro Plus key:

are not two prices for the same thing. Office Home 2024 costs around Q1,100 to Q1,300 new, and Microsoft 365 Personal about Q670 a year. Listings for Office Professional Plus or Windows 11 Pro at a few dozen quetzales, often sold as “lifetime” keys with phone activation, are usually volume keys meant for a company’s computers. Each carries a limited number of activations shared by everyone it was sold to, so an install that works today may refuse to activate after a reinstall or a new drive. A genuine sealed retail card is worth close to the shelf price; a used one already removed from someone’s PC is worth less, because it is a version behind and the buyer has to trust the removal.

Scratch panels, Microsoft accounts and shared family plans:

are where pre-owned software goes wrong. On a card, check that the scratch panel or seal over the code is untouched. Once a Microsoft 365 or Office code is redeemed it belongs to the account that redeemed it, so an opened card is worth nothing to you. A retail Windows licence can move to another PC once it is off the old one; an OEM one cannot. Some people sell a place in their Microsoft 365 Family plan: the owner can share it with up to five people, can remove you at any time, and your files sit on storage someone else pays for. Check the box against your machine too: old suites such as Adobe CS6 will not install on Macs from macOS Catalina onwards. And cracked installers and activators are a common route for malware onto a PC.

Listing a software licence without giving the code away:

photograph the card or box with the scratch panel showing intact, never the code itself. Give the exact edition, platform and number of devices, whether it is retail or OEM, and whether it has ever been activated. If you are selling a retail Windows or Office you have used, say how you removed it from your computer and your Microsoft account. Keep the receipt if you have one. A buyer coming in from Cuilapa or Guastatoya cannot test a licence by looking at it, so meet somewhere with Wi-Fi and let them redeem the code on their own account before they pay.