Microsoft has decided to delay its planned price increase of Office 365 for an additional two weeks.
The software giant had announced its first “substantive” price increase since launching Office 365 in 2011 was set to occur on March 1, 2022.
Thankfully though, pricing will not increase for consumers or Microsoft's education customers at this time but businesses that use Microsoft's office software can expect to pay quite a bit more depending on how many employees they have when they need to renew their subscriptions.
Pricing grace period
In a support document published at the end of February, Microsoft informed its reseller partners that it had created a “transitional grace period” due to high demand by businesses looking to renew their subscriptions before the company's pricing changes went into effect.
For those unfamiliar with Microsoft's pricing changes, Microsoft 365 Business Basic will increase from $5 to $6 per user per year, Microsoft 365 Business Premium will go from $20 to $22, Office 365 E1 will go from $8 to $10, Office 365 E3 will go from $20 to $23, Office 365 E5 will go from $35 to $38 and Microsoft 365 E3 will go from $32 to $36.
As a result, Cloud Solution Providers (CSPs) now have until 5pm PDT on March 14 or 12am UTC on March 15 to submit transactions and have them invoiced at the software giant's February 2022 pricing. This means that the next few weeks will likely be quite busy for CSPs as businesses try to renew one last time with the old Office 365 pricing.
While Microsoft did wait over a decade to raise the price of both Office 365 and Microsoft 365, some businesses could turn to Google Workspace or other Microsoft Office alternatives following the implementation of the company's planned price increase.
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Via ZDNet
