Microsoft are Increasing Prices by 9%

12 January 2023

We learned recently that – with effect from 1^st April 2023 – Microsoft are increasing their prices for cloud services by 9%.

The official announcement for this is posted on the Microsoft site at: https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2023/01/05/consistent-global-pricing-for-the-microsoft-cloud/

Microsoft might now be increasing prices twice a year.

This will affect customers with some services hosted by Microsoft such as Azure, Microsoft 365 and so on.

If your billing relationship is with us, affected services will attract a price increase of 9% though any customers that have a discount (e.g. as part of our Community Technology Programme or other contractual commitments) will continue to receive the same discount level albeit based upon the higher base price.

We have the following observations:

Customers on a Hosted Exchange Platform are not affected and so the prices for this service are likely to remain the same for the current time. Our supplier confirmed this position earlier this week.
Customers that use either the Zimbra Email & Collaboration Platform or a traditional IMAP Email Hosting Service are not affected by this announcement. Remember these services are Open Source and so users with this service are less exposed to price increases.
The price increases for Microsoft services are pegged to the US Dollar and Microsoft are saying they will “assess pricing in local currency as part of a regular twice a year cadence”. This tells us that customers that use Microsoft Cloud services could be exposed to more price fluctuations than those that choose to host their data or services either ‘on premise’ or with UK or EU based organisations. You can bet that prices are likely to be ratcheted and are unlikely to go back down if the exchange rate changes in your favour.