From my experience, it's not totally necessary to upgrade to a paid version to store your encryption keys elsewhere. I use a local account for my PC (Windows 11 Home btw), which means most of my data doesn't sync to Microsoft servers. This also means they can't store my bitlocker encryption keys, so I made sure to set up the local account and store the keys securely. So it is possible, but requires some configuration.
On Windows Home PCs, I believe that there's no way to enable Device Encryption without signing in with a Microsoft account. So that means Microsoft doesn't have your encryption key, but also that there is no disk encryption used on your PC's storage. There _may_ be a complex way around this that tricks Windows into enabling Device Encryption without storing the key with Microsoft, but I'm not sure that there is -- I've never heard of it.
Very educational for me
From my experience, it's not totally necessary to upgrade to a paid version to store your encryption keys elsewhere. I use a local account for my PC (Windows 11 Home btw), which means most of my data doesn't sync to Microsoft servers. This also means they can't store my bitlocker encryption keys, so I made sure to set up the local account and store the keys securely. So it is possible, but requires some configuration.
On Windows Home PCs, I believe that there's no way to enable Device Encryption without signing in with a Microsoft account. So that means Microsoft doesn't have your encryption key, but also that there is no disk encryption used on your PC's storage. There _may_ be a complex way around this that tricks Windows into enabling Device Encryption without storing the key with Microsoft, but I'm not sure that there is -- I've never heard of it.