There are three certainties in life. They are in no particular order: Death, taxes, and the fact that your business’s subscriptions are going to go up in price. There isn’t much that I can help you with on the first two, so let’s take a look at the pricing changes going on over at Microsoft. First the bad news. Prices on Microsoft subscriptions are going up across the board for the most commonly used workplace licenses, including the Business Basic, Premium, E3, and E5 licenses. Notably though, education and consumer products are not being impacted by price changes. Microsoft first announced that these changes were in the pipeline back in August. They cited their advances in collaboration and communication tools like Teams and SharePoint, as well as increased security and automation technologies that they have worked into their product in recent years, to show added value. Though they did not directly tie the waves of features to this specific rise in prices.
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Looking at these price changes, they might not be dramatic but they will have an impact on costs. Especially for those organizations purchasing lots of licenses. Note though that these numbers only reflect the cost of the annual plans. Microsoft appears to be taking this opportunity to direct customers off of their older packages and towards the NCE. Microsoft is offering a 5% discount to those who choose to move to the new commerce experience (NCE)’s annual plan by June 30. Prices will of course spike higher for those that want to go month-to-month. New subscriptions for NCE must be purchased by March 14th, so organizations considering making this move should act sooner than later. New Legacy subscriptions in NCE need to be renewed by July 1. They will not be automatically renewed, so either way an action must be taken on your end to either continue or move to a different plan. While the folks up in Redmond are talking about providing a grace period for those that do not act by the deadline, do not expect any discounts for this track as they apparently really want to drive traffic towards the NCE. Nobody wants to pay more, but we learn that understanding the ratio of annual vs monthly subscriptions isn’t exactly straightforward.
