Non-profits should pay: Microsoft cancels free M365 Business Premium
Until now, Microsoft has distributed free licenses of M365 Business Premium to non-profit organizations. This is now a thing of the past.
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Microsoft will be asking non-profit organizations (NPOs) to pay in the future. The US company has announced that it will discontinue its free licenses for Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Office 365 E1 from 1 July 2025. New free licenses or renewals of expiring subscriptions are already no longer available. With this step, Microsoft wants to streamline its subsidized offerings and simplify its portfolio for NPOs, according to the announcement. As an alternative, Microsoft is offering the M365 Business Basic package.
NPOs lose Office programs on the desktop
By switching to M365 Business Basic, NPOs will lose access to the desktop versions of the Office programs, which will then only be available as web and mobile applications. The Intune management platform and Entra ID access management are also not included in the M365 Business Basic plan. The same applies to Microsoft Defender and Purview. However, NPOs retain MS Teams, Outlook and SharePoint, as well as one terabyte of cloud storage per user in OneDrive in the basic package.
Non-profit organizations that require more than 300 licenses or use services from the premium package will inevitably have to pay. Although Microsoft offers a discount of up to 75 percent for other M365 packages, this means that the premium tariff costs USD 6.60 per user per month. For the mid-range M365 Business Standard package with desktop applications from the Office packages, but without Intune and Entra ID, the price is USD 3.75 per month and user. With annual payment, the prices per user are 5.50 US dollars per month and 3.13 US dollars respectively.
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Microsoft increases prices and pushes for subscriptions
Microsoft recently conducted a specially commissioned study in an attempt to entice its corporate customers to subscribe to Microsoft 365 with the alleged benefits of perpetual Office licenses. In addition to access to the video conferencing tool Teams and the AI chatbot Copilot, the US company advertised a return on investment of 223 percent. Copilot has only been part of the M365 portfolio for private customers since January 2025. Microsoft took the opportunity to increase subscription fees by 30 percent.
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