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Licensing optimisation
Put in what you are on today. The calculator uses Microsoft’s published price list for the Europe region — the same numbers your invoice is based on — and shows you what the three standard levers are worth before anyone looks at your tenant.
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Add a line for each plan you hold. Everything is calculated at Microsoft’s list price, so the numbers are conservative — our price to you is lower than list.
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The lever almost nobody uses
Terms are set per subscription, not per tenant. You can hold fifty Microsoft 365 Business Premium seats on an annual commitment because you know you will never be below fifty people — and another twenty of the identical licence on a monthly commitment because they are seasonal.
When the season ends and you are down to five seasonal staff, you drop fifteen of the monthly seats at the next monthly renewal. The fifty annual seats are untouched. The annual price protects your baseline; the monthly term absorbs the peak.
Seventy Business Premium seats, of which twenty are seasonal for two months:
Microsoft list prices, EUR, September 2026. The saving comes from the shape of the commitment, not from a discount.
The mechanic behind it is simple and it is worth knowing: on an annual term you can add seats at any time but only reduce them at renewal. On a monthly term you can reduce at each monthly anniversary. So the right question is not “annual or monthly” — it is “how many seats will we certainly still need in twelve months?” That number goes on the annual term. Everything above it goes monthly.
Microsoft’s own rules, used properly
None of these require a negotiation or a special deal. They are how the programme is designed to work, and most organisations simply have not been told.
The point above, and the highest-value one on this page for anyone with seasonal, project-based or contractor headcount. Put your floor on an annual term and the variable part on monthly.
A shared mailbox up to 50 GB needs no licence at all. So when someone leaves, the licence should come off — but the mailbox should not go with it.
The sequence that works: block the account from signing in, convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox, then release the licence. Give Full Access to whoever is taking the work over — the replacement, the team lead, the manager — and Send on Behalf so their replies go out properly attributed rather than appearing to come from someone who no longer works there. The address stays alive, so mail from clients and suppliers does not bounce, and the history stays searchable.
Deleting the account instead is the expensive mistake: the mail is gone, the address bounces, and whoever inherits the relationship starts from nothing. One exception worth knowing — if the mailbox needs litigation hold or an archive, it does still require a licence. That is a small number of mailboxes, not all of them.
This one item accounts for a large share of what we find on most tenants.
Several capabilities are sold both as a standalone plan and as a much cheaper add-on to a plan you already hold — Teams Phone, Entra ID, Defender and audit retention among them. The names are close enough that buying the wrong one is easy and expensive.
Group-based licensing in Entra ID assigns and removes automatically as people join and leave. It is included in Entra ID P1, which you already have with Business Premium, Microsoft 365 E3 and E5. It is the fix that stops orphaned licences coming back next year.
Registered charities and educational institutions get substantially lower prices, and some plans are free for a limited number of seats. Eligibility has to be verified with Microsoft, and organisations that qualify are often unaware. Our price list has all three segments if you want to compare.
Shift workers, drivers and shop-floor staff who need mail and Teams on a phone do not need the same licence as an accountant. Microsoft 365 F3 exists precisely for this, at a fraction of the price. Mixed estates are almost always cheaper than one plan for everybody.
Subscriptions bought at different times renew at different times, which means the estate can never be reviewed as a whole. Aligning them produces no saving on the day and makes every future review possible.
Most plans have a free trial, and new subscriptions carry a short cancellation window with a prorated refund — currently seven days, though Microsoft has changed it before. Neither is a loophole; both are there so you can find out whether a plan fits before it becomes a year-long commitment.
What we actually find
These are what a read-only pass over a real tenant turns up. Most of them are invisible from the invoice alone.
The single most common finding, and the easiest to fix. Offboarding removes the account from the address book long before anyone thinks to release the subscription. On a tenant of 200 people we typically find somewhere between five and twenty. The fix is not to delete the account — it is to convert the mailbox to a shared one and hand access to whoever inherits the work. That is practice 02 below.
Paying month to month with no commitment costs about 20% more than a one-year commitment paid annually. It buys flexibility that most organisations never use. The calculator above puts a number on it for your seat count.
Since 2023 most bundles are sold in the EEA without Teams, at a lower price. If you already licence Teams separately, or genuinely do not use it, you are paying twice. Nobody moves you to the cheaper SKU automatically.
E5 is bought for the security and compliance stack — Defender for Endpoint, Insider Risk, Premium eDiscovery. We regularly find those switched off or never configured. That is not an argument for downgrading everyone; it is an argument for either turning them on or licensing only the people who need them.
Frontline staff who need a mailbox and Teams on a phone do not need the same licence as a finance controller. A mixed estate — F3 for shop-floor, Business Premium or E3 for office staff, E5 for the handful who need compliance tooling — is usually both cheaper and better fitted.
After an acquisition the same person often exists in both estates, licensed twice. This is invisible on either invoice on its own. It is also the reason licensing reviews and tenant consolidation tend to arrive together.
Several capabilities are sold both as a standalone plan and as a much cheaper add-on to a plan you already hold. Defender, Entra ID and audit retention all work this way, and the naming does not make the difference obvious.
Subscriptions bought at different times renew at different times, which means the estate can never be reviewed as a whole. Aligning the dates is dull work with no immediate saving, and it is what makes every future review possible.
The one that saves more than money
The practice above assumes the mail is still there when you go looking. Litigation hold is what makes that assumption safe.
With a mailbox on litigation hold, nothing can be permanently removed. The user can still delete mail and empty the deleted items folder, and from their point of view it is gone. Underneath, a copy is retained in a hidden Recoverable Items area and stays there for as long as the hold is in place. Only an administrator can retrieve it, through eDiscovery.
It is silent. The user is not told, and no icon appears anywhere. That is the point: a hold announced in advance is a hold that gets worked around.
It is not a backup. It preserves mailbox content against deletion; it does not protect you against a tenant-level disaster, ransomware in SharePoint, or a mistake in a Purview retention policy. Organisations that treat hold as backup find that out at the worst possible moment.
It also does not apply retroactively. Mail permanently deleted before the hold was applied is not recoverable. This is the whole reason it belongs in a licensing conversation rather than a legal one — by the time you need it, it is too late to turn on.
Four situations where it earns its cost
The employee who cleans out their mailbox on the way out. A salesperson resigns on Friday, spends the afternoon deleting correspondence with their accounts, and starts at a competitor on Monday. Without a hold, that mail is gone the moment the retention window expires. With one, every message is still there and recoverable, and nobody had to predict the resignation.
A dispute you find out about a year later. A client claims something was agreed in writing in 2024. The person who wrote it left in 2025 and the mailbox was deleted. If the mailbox was on hold and the licence removed, it became an inactive mailbox — still searchable, still admissible, costing nothing.
A regulator or auditor asks for records. Financial services, healthcare and anyone under a retention obligation are expected to produce correspondence on request. “The user deleted it” is not an accepted answer, and the fine is rarely smaller than the licensing would have been.
An internal investigation. A harassment complaint, a suspected fraud, a leak. Whatever the outcome, the record has to be intact and untouched by the person under investigation — and it has to have been intact before anyone knew there was a complaint.
Litigation hold is a feature of Exchange Online Plan 2. What matters is whether your plan is built on Plan 1 or Plan 2.
Microsoft list prices, EUR, September 2026. Microsoft 365 Business Premium sits between the two — ask us to confirm your exact entitlement before relying on it, because Microsoft has moved this line before.
A mailbox on litigation hold keeps its contents after the licence is removed. Take the licence off a mailbox that is under hold and it becomes an inactive mailbox: invisible in the address book, costing nothing, and still fully searchable through eDiscovery for as long as the hold lasts.
That changes how offboarding should work. For most leavers, convert to a shared mailbox and hand access over — the exact order is here — practice 02 above. For the ones where the record might matter later — anyone client-facing, anyone in a regulated role, anyone leaving under a cloud — put the mailbox on hold before you remove the licence. You pay nothing to keep it, and you never have to explain to a lawyer why it is not there.
The order matters and it is not reversible. Remove the licence first and the mailbox is deleted after the grace period, hold or no hold.
Being straight about it
It will not save everyone money. Some tenants are already tidy. On those we say so, and there is no invoice for having looked. We would rather that than manufacture a finding.
It is not a compliance audit. We look at what you are paying for against what you are using. Whether your configuration satisfies a specific regulatory framework is a different exercise, and if that is what you need we will tell you who does it properly.
Downgrading is not automatically the answer. If E5 features are switched off, the cheaper fix is often to switch them on rather than to stop paying for them. Security capability you have already bought is the least expensive security you will ever get.
We are not neutral, and you should know it. We sell licences. Recommending you buy fewer of them costs us margin in the short term and earns the relationship in the long term — and every client who has been through this knows which way we chose. Read that with the appropriate scepticism, then check what we find against the price list yourself.
Free · read-only · no obligation
We run a read-only pass over your Microsoft 365 tenant — no agents installed, no changes made — and send back a written summary: unassigned licences, mismatched plans, duplicate subscriptions, renewal dates, and what each of them is worth in your currency. It costs nothing and there is no obligation afterwards.
Common questions
It varies far too much to quote a percentage honestly. The two levers that apply to almost everyone are commitment term, worth about 20% against month-to-month billing, and the EEA no-Teams SKUs, worth roughly 15% on most bundles. Everything beyond that depends on how tidy the tenant already is.
Yes, and most organisations with variable headcount should. Terms are set per subscription, not per tenant. Put the number of seats you are certain to need in twelve months on an annual commitment, and the variable part on monthly so you can release those seats at the next monthly renewal. On an annual term you can add seats at any time but only reduce them at renewal; on a monthly term you can reduce at each monthly anniversary.
Block the account from signing in, convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox, then release the licence. Grant Full Access to the person taking over the work and Send on Behalf so their replies are attributed correctly. A shared mailbox up to 50 GB needs no licence, the address keeps working so client mail does not bounce, and the history stays searchable. The exception is a mailbox under litigation hold or with an archive, which still requires a licence.
Litigation hold prevents anything in a mailbox being permanently deleted — the user can still delete mail, but a copy is retained invisibly and can be recovered through eDiscovery. It is a feature of Exchange Online Plan 2, so it is included in Office 365 E3 and E5 and Microsoft 365 E3 and E5. Plans built on Exchange Online Plan 1 need an Exchange Online Archiving add-on, around €2.60 per user per month. It is not a backup, and it does not recover anything deleted before the hold was applied.
Yes, in two different ways. Convert it to a shared mailbox and it costs nothing up to 50 GB, with access handed to whoever takes over the work. Or, if the record might matter in a dispute, place the mailbox on litigation hold before removing the licence — it then becomes an inactive mailbox, costs nothing, and stays searchable through eDiscovery. The order matters: remove the licence first and the mailbox is deleted after the grace period.
A read-only delegated role in your tenant, or a report you export yourself if you would rather not grant access at all. No agents are installed and nothing is changed. We are happy to work from your own export if that is easier for your security team.
No. The review is free and carries no obligation. Plenty of the tenants we look at stay with their existing provider, and that is a perfectly reasonable outcome.
Microsoft prices the flexibility. A monthly subscription with no commitment can be cancelled at any time, and that option costs roughly 20% more than committing for a year. If your headcount is stable, you are paying for insurance you will not claim.
Following a European competition case, Microsoft now sells most Microsoft 365 and Office 365 bundles in the EEA in two forms: with Teams, and without it at a lower price. Existing customers were not moved automatically. If Teams is licensed separately or genuinely unused, the unbundled SKU is cheaper for exactly the same everything else.
Yes, and it is where the biggest findings usually are. Different entities buy from different resellers on different terms and nobody sees the whole estate. We hold Cloud Solution Provider authorisations across 131 countries, so we can look at all of it and then invoice each entity locally in its own currency.