When Discounts Disappear: Why Microsoft’s Price Hike Exposes a Bigger Problem

Microsoft Ends Volume Discounts. Everyone Pays More.

🚨 Microsoft has confirmed what many IT leaders suspected: enterprise volume discounts for Online Services are ending November 2025.

From that date, the price you pay for Microsoft 365, Dynamics, or Windows 365 is the same whether you’re buying 500 seats or 50,000. No loyalty tiers. No enterprise advantage. Just the public list price, for everyone.

For most large organisations, that means a 6–12% jump in costs at renewal. Put into perspective:

• A 6,000-seat business faces an extra $400,000–$500,000 annually.

• A 25,000-seat enterprise is staring at a $1.8 million increase every year - for the exact same services.

This isn’t just a price rise. It’s a structural warning about who really controls your IT spend and your resilience.

The Bigger Lesson

This isn’t about 6%, 9%, or 12%. It’s about the danger of letting a single vendor hold all the levers.

When Microsoft controls your productivity suite, your retention defaults, your recovery options, and now your cost model - you don’t own IT. You lease it. And the landlord just raised the rent.

Dependency isn’t resilience - it’s concentration risk on a global scale.

The implications go far beyond budgets:

• 💸 A CFO’s forecast can collapse with a single licensing update

• 📜 A compliance regime can shift overnight if default settings change

• 🔄 A recovery plan can be compromised by the very company that created the outage in the first place

That’s not resilience. That’s concentration risk on a global scale.

Loyalty doesn’t buy security. It buys dependency. And dependency is the opposite of control.

The Retired User Trap

Buried beneath the headlines about 12% price hikes is a quieter bleed that drains budgets year after year: retired users.

Every organisation has them. Former employees whose mailboxes, files, and Teams chats must be retained for legal or regulatory reasons. In Microsoft’s model, the only way to keep that data is to keep paying for the license. One person leaves, the bill doesn’t. Ten people leave, the bill grows. Multiply that over years, and you’re effectively paying millions to preserve the digital ghosts of your workforce.

Every ex-employee left on your licensing bill is a ghost draining budget. Keepit makes their data immutable and compliant - without costing a cent.

As an Elite Reseller of Keepit, FullBackup gives organisations a way out:

• 🔒 Retired users’ data is retained immutably

• 📂 Audits and investigations can access it instantly

• ✅ Compliance obligations are met without hidden licensing fees

• 💰 Cost: $0

  
  

This isn’t just trimming fat from the budget. It’s a philosophical shift: your regulatory obligations should never be treated as a revenue stream for your vendor.

The Compliance Angle

The headlines talk about cost. The real story is compliance.

Under CPS 230 and the Essential Eight, resilience isn’t a “nice to have.” It must be:

• Independent of production systems

• Provable to auditors

• Sustainable under budgetary pressure

None of those requirements can be guaranteed if your recovery strategy is bound to the same vendor selling you the licenses. When Microsoft shifts the rules, your entire compliance posture moves with them.

Let’s be blunt:

• If Microsoft changes retention defaults tomorrow, can you still prove compliance?

• If a 12% uplift blows your budget, will you cut corners elsewhere and increase operational risk?

• If a regulator asks for evidence of independence, can you provide it - or are you pointing back to the same vendor who just raised your bill?

When compliance is tied to Microsoft’s licensing model, it’s fragile by design. Independent resilience is the only defence regulators and auditors will trust.

Resilience that depends on Microsoft’s business decisions isn’t resilience at all. It’s concentration risk dressed up as convenience.

And when the audit comes, no regulator will accept “our vendor changed the terms” as a defence.

The Way Out

Microsoft isn’t hiding what it’s doing. It’s tightening the screws. The only real question is whether you let them dictate both your costs and your compliance.

The alternative is clear.

True resilience isn’t negotiated at renewal. It’s built on sovereignty - control of your data, your compliance, and your costs. That’s what Keepit, restores.

As an Elite Reseller of Keepit, FullBackup equips organisations with a model built on independence, not dependency:

• 💰 Retired users don’t drain your budget - their data is retained immutably at zero cost

• ⚡ Recovery remains fast, compliant, and untouched by Microsoft’s pricing games

• 🏛️ Sovereignty is restored - your data, your timelines, your control

This isn’t about trimming a few points off a renewal. It’s about building resilience that:

• Regulators respect

• Auditors trust

• CFOs can predict without fear of surprise uplifts

The next era of IT leadership won’t be measured by who negotiated the sharpest discount. It will be measured by who built resilience that can’t be taken away.

Final Word

Microsoft’s decision to end volume discounts is the spark. The fire is what it exposes: a fragile model where cost, compliance, and continuity are dictated by the same vendor.

If a single licensing change can add millions to your budget overnight, sovereignty isn’t something you “lost” - it’s something you never had.

That’s why the real story here isn’t about percentages on a spreadsheet. It’s about leadership. The organisations that thrive in the next decade will be those that take back control of their data, their compliance, and their budgets.

Microsoft’s licensing model highlights the risk of dependency. With Keepit, organisations reclaim sovereignty over data, compliance, and cost - resilience that can’t be taken away.

👉 As an Elite Reseller of Keepit, FullBackup helps enterprises cut through the noise and build resilience that can’t be taken away.

See it in action: https://www.fullbackup.com.au/demo-and-pilot