Microsoft announced "new prices" for its subscriptions, which include various cloud services and, depending on the design, additionally the Office applications as well as Windows 10 Enterprise. The manufacturer cites the significantly increased number of features and applications as the reason.

The blog post in which Microsoft announces the higher costs for its services and apps also justifies the measures with the fact that there has not been a major price increase since the introduction of Office 365 ten years ago. During this period, however, the prices for subscriptions were raised in smaller steps.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's central argument is that the scope of the bundle of online services and local applications has been significantly expanded. Since the introduction of Microsoft 365 four years ago, 24 applications have been added.

As examples, Microsoft cites Teams, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Stream, Planner, Visio, OneDrive, Yammer and Whiteboard.

The following subscriptions will be affected by the price increase starting March 1, 2022:

• 20%    Microsoft 365 Business Basic
• 10%    Microsoft 365 Business Premium 
• 25%    Office 365 E1                             
• 15%    Office 365 E3                           
• 8.5%   Office 365 E5 
• 12.5% Microsoft 365 E3 

All prices are per user and month. Current prices for Switzerland have not yet been published. It is assumed that the prices in Switzerland will be increased to a similar extent.

Subscriptions for educational institutions and private users are not currently affected by the price increase.