Microsoft has recently changed its billing and licensing policies. This affects most Microsoft 365 users, including our clients: our hope with this page is to explain how these changes may affect your strategic planning in the coming months.
What's happening now: price increases & licensing migration
The first change is a flat price increase, which was announced in late 2021 and will take effect for our clients April 1st, 2022. This will affect most Microsoft user licenses, like Business Premium (from $20 to $22 per month) or Standard (from $5 to $6 per month).
The second change is a migration to the Microsoft New Commerce Experience platform, and is mostly a backend change – in fact, we’ve already migrated you over, but wanted to inform you just in case you noticed any changes to the names or SKUs on your invoice.
The big question: monthly vs annual licensing
The final change is an additional tiered price increase, which is a bit more complicated. For years, our clients have been able to subscribe to their Microsoft 365 licenses on a month-to-month basis, while taking advantage of the annual pricing discounts. This allowed clients to adjust their number of licenses up or down whenever team sizes changed. This will still be possible under Microsoft’s new platform, however, month-to-month subscriptions will no longer receive this annual discount. Starting in July 2022, month-to-month subscription prices will increase by at least 20%. Microsoft will require clients to commit to full annual subscriptions to maintain their prior annual pricing discounts.
What do I do now?
There is no action required from you right now. We will be reaching out with more information soon, but wanted to prepare you for these conversations as soon as possible before you must make a decision at the end of Q2.
Because Microsoft only finalized these changes at the end of January, there are still many open questions about how this new system will function. We’ve been working quickly to identify and answer those questions, so we may mitigate the impact to you as our client. However, we fully expect more changes and clarifications to emerge. When they do, we’ll be ready to consult and clarify, doing everything we can to Make IT Easy for you and your team.