Windows 10 Solitaire requires a paid subscription to remove ads

There’s a big caveat to note here before we even begin – Windows 10 is currently free to the vast majority of Windows owners.

This has never happened before, and the upgrade is as simple as clicking on the notification in your system tray, waiting for your turn and giving your PC the nod to get to work. Windows has never been a cheap product, so by any account a free upgrade to a brand new and generally well received OS is a very good deal.

But nothing in life comes for free.

Solitaire has been an ever-present feature for most Windows users, and Windows 10 doesn’t break from that tradition. One tradition it does trample on, however, is offering the card game as a free part of the OS.

The Windows 10 version of Solitaire, while more feature rich than previous iterations, also forces ads on the user. Pretty big, unskippable video ads, too, of between 15 and 30 seconds. Users can be rid of these at a price – $1.49 for a month, or $9.99 for a year.

Signing up for Premium also awards users larger coin rewards for completing daily challenges and additional boosts for some game modes.

PC Gamer notes that Minesweeper for Windows 10 is also ad-supported, although unlike Solitaire it is a separate Microsoft Store download. Solitaire for Windows 8.1 also had paid removal of ads but again was a separate download.