Starting in 2022, Microsoft is making changes to how we (and all other resellers) can price Microsoft Cloud Services. Previously, we have been able to sell products at the annual price on a month-to-month commitment. In the future, that price will only be given with an annual commitment and will be in-line with the Microsoft published pricing. This is called the New Commerce Experience, or NCE for short.
With an annual commitment, you will still be able to pay for your licenses on a monthly invoice, or you can pay for the full year at one time. You will be guaranteed that the price will not increase during your commitment. Some products will be able to have a 36 month commitment.
If you make an annual commitment, you will be able to add users and upgrade the license. New licenses will be prorated so everything renews at the same time. However, you will not be able to reduce the number of licenses or downgrade the product during this commitment period.
The month-to-month commitment will still be available on the business plan products. The new pricing on this has not been released but will generally be 20% above the annual commitment. The advantage of the month-to-month commitment is that you can cancel these licenses at any time.
You can mix and match commitments: if you have a short-term increase in staffing needs, you can purchase monthly commitments for the temporary staff and discontinue this product at any time.
We will be communicating with our customers in January with more specifics on how this affects your particular needs. Existing subscriptions need to be migrated over to the New Commerce Experience by June 30, 2022. New subscriptions made after March 10, 2022, will be on the NCE model. Non-profit and education products will not be offered on NCE at this time.
Please check back to this blog post for additional updates as they become available.
