What You Need to Know About Microsoft’s O365 and M365 Price Increases
After a decade of unchanged prices (aside from newly introduced services), Microsoft is raising prices for enterprise Office 365 licenses. These changes will take effect on March 1 of 2022. There are no (immediate) plans to raise the cost of either educational or commercial suites.
Here’s what the price changes look like:
- Microsoft 365 Business Basic: increasing from $5 to $6 per license (20% increase)
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium: increasing from $20 to $22 per license (10% increase)
- Office 365 E1: increasing from $8 to $10 per license (25% increase)
- Office 365 E3: increasing from $20 to $23 per license (15% increase)
- Office 365 E5: increasing from $35 to $38 per license (~8.6% increase)
- Microsoft 365 E3: increasing from $32 to $36 per license (12.5% increase)
While the individual prices aren’t a huge increase, the percentage increase ranges from around 8.6% (O365 E5) to 25% (O365 E1). This change overwhelmingly impacts the lower tier licenses and will be a major increase for smaller clients.
The one silver lining is that Microsoft has announced that: [W]e are announcing that we will add unlimited dial-in capabilities for Microsoft Teams meetings across our enterprise, business, frontline, and government suites over the next few months. The standard audio conferencing license is $4 a month, so this does work out to a bit of a discount for certain use cases.
With Office 365 E5 getting a hike, it’s safe to assume that other products will be getting a hike down the line. It might not happen anytime soon, but it seems to be in line with how Microsoft tends to raise prices. Keep in mind, this is all speculation and not rooted in any specific announcement or other information aside from trends with Microsoft. Don’t sound the alarm quite yet, but it is something to keep an eye on down the line.
See Microsoft’s release for other details.