Microsoft 365 Prices Are Going Up — Here's Why Business Premium Is Still the Best Buy

I've been watching the Microsoft 365 pricing updates roll in, and there's something most small business owners haven't noticed yet.

Every plan is getting more expensive on July 1, 2026 — except one.

Business Basic is going up 16%. Business Standard is going up 12%. Apps for Business is jumping 21%. But Business Premium? $22 per user per month. Same as before.

And here's what makes it interesting: it's not staying the same because Microsoft forgot about it. It's staying the same while they add more to it — 50GB of additional mailbox storage, Copilot Chat enhancements, and Chat Analytics. Meanwhile, Business Standard users are paying more for less.

So I want to walk through why Business Premium was already the right move, and why these price changes just made the math impossible to ignore.

Why Microsoft 365 is still the best platform for business

Before we even compare plans, let's be honest about why we're on Microsoft 365 in the first place.

It's not because it's the cheapest option. It's because it's the one platform where you don't have to stitch together five different services and pray they talk to each other.

Email, calendar, file storage, video calls, chat, document collaboration — it's all in one place. My team lives in Teams and SharePoint. Our clients send Word documents and Excel sheets every day. Nobody's asking me to switch to a competitor because the reality is, when you're running a business, you don't want to be the person explaining why your "alternative" email system corrupted an attachment or why the calendar invite didn't sync.

Microsoft 365 is the default for a reason. The ecosystem is deep, the integrations are everywhere, and the reliability is something you stop thinking about — and that's exactly the point.

I've worked with businesses that tried to go cheap. They signed up for a free email provider, bought Google Workspace for some users, kept Microsoft for others, and ended up with calendars that didn't sync across teams, document formats that broke during client handoffs, and nobody knowing where anything was. The money they "saved" on licensing they lost three times over in productivity.

The lesson is simple: Pick one platform and go all in. And if you're going to go all in, Microsoft 365 is the platform that gives you the most for your money — especially right now.

The pricing shakeup you need to know about

Here's what changes on July 1, 2026:

That's not a typo. The premium tier — the one with advanced security, device management, and compliance tools — is the only plan that didn't move.

The steepest increase hit Apps for Business, which is the weirdest one in the lineup. It's $10 a month and you don't even get email. No Teams, no SharePoint, no Exchange — just the desktop apps. And it went up 21%. If you're on Apps for Business, you are paying nearly half of Business Standard for maybe a quarter of the value. That plan exists for one specific use case, and if you're not that use case, you should not be on it.

But the real story is between Standard and Premium.

What Business Premium actually gives you

A lot of people look at the price difference between Standard ($14) and Premium ($22) and think they're saving eight bucks. But here's what you're leaving on the table:

Intune device management

This is the big one. Intune lets you manage every laptop and phone in your company from one console. You can enforce security policies, require device encryption, remotely wipe a lost device, and make sure nobody's logging into company email from a phone with no passcode.

Here's the thing: standalone Intune Plan 1 costs $8/user/month. So if you need device management — and you do, once you have more than a couple of employees — you've already closed the entire price gap between Standard and Premium. And you're getting all the other stuff for free.

What does device management actually mean in practice? Let's say an employee loses their laptop at a coffee shop. Without Intune, you're hoping it had a password and that nothing sensitive was stored locally. With Intune, you open a dashboard, click "Wipe," and the device is clean within minutes — no matter where it is. That's not enterprise-level paranoia anymore. That's table stakes for any business handling customer data.

Microsoft Defender for Business

Built-in ransomware protection, next-gen antivirus, endpoint detection and response, automated threat investigation. If you're still running a third-party antivirus that you pay for separately, you're probably paying more for less.

Defender isn't just signature-based antivirus that checks files against a known list. It uses behavioral analysis, which means it can catch attacks it's never seen before by recognizing what an attack looks like — unusual process behavior, suspicious network connections, scripts behaving strangely. Most third-party AV products in the $3-5/month range don't do this. Defender does, and it's included.

Entra ID Premium (formerly Azure AD)

This is where the real security value lives. Conditional access policies let you set rules like: "If someone tries to sign in from outside the country, block them unless they use multi-factor authentication." Or: "Require MFA for all users, but only challenge them every 30 days on trusted devices."

Basic Entra ID (which comes with Standard) gives you user management and single sign-on. But it doesn't give you conditional access. And conditional access is the difference between hoping your MFA works and knowing it works. A standalone Entra ID P1 license is $6/user/month. That's another $6 that's already inside Premium.

Azure Information Protection

Email encryption and data classification. You can send sensitive documents without worrying about them getting forwarded to the wrong person. You can set policies that automatically encrypt emails containing certain keywords or credit card patterns. You can prevent people from forwarding or printing protected documents even after they've downloaded them.

If you handle financial data, medical records, legal documents, or anything that would be bad if it leaked — this alone justifies the upgrade.

SafeLinks and Safe Attachments

This is worth calling out because Microsoft is adding "SafeLinks Lite" to Basic and Standard as part of this update. But here's the difference: SafeLinks Lite checks links when you click them. Full SafeLinks (in Premium) wraps and rewrites every link to check it in real time, plus it scans attachments in a sandbox before delivering them.

The Lite version is better than nothing. But it's a reactive check — the link only gets scanned when someone clicks it. Full SafeLinks scans every link before the email even lands in the inbox. With phishing being the number one attack vector against small businesses, that difference matters.

What you're actually paying for when you buy Standard

Let's do the math properly. If you buy Business Standard and try to match what Premium gives you:

You're paying $22 for what would cost $33–35 to build yourself. That's a 33–37% discount off the à la carte price — and that was before the price increases on Standard made the comparison even starker.

Now post-July 1, the gap is $22 versus $14 for Standard. An $8 difference. Intune alone is $8. You literally don't need any other Premium feature to justify the upgrade — and you're getting five of them.

The real cost of "saving" money

I talked to a business owner recently who was paying for Business Standard across 15 seats. He was also paying for a separate antivirus, a separate email encryption tool, and had no device management at all. His total per-user cost was around $31/month — and his security was weaker than what Business Premium would have given him for $22.

When I pointed this out, his first reaction was "why didn't anyone tell me this before?" His second reaction was frustration that he'd been paying nearly $9 more per user per month for an inferior setup.

This is the trap. You look at the $22 line item and think it's expensive. But you're probably already paying for the pieces somewhere else — just in a less integrated, harder-to-manage way.

The integration part matters more than most people realize. When your antivirus, device management, email encryption, and identity protection are all from different vendors, you have four dashboards to check, four support teams to call, and four places where something can break without the others knowing. When it's all in one platform, you have one dashboard, one support contact, and one place where threats surface. When Defender detects something suspicious on a device, it can tell Intune to quarantine that device. When Entra ID sees a risky sign-in, it can trigger an alert in Defender. These products were built to talk to each other, and they do.

The hidden security gap most businesses don't see

Here's something I've learned from managing IT for small businesses: the companies that get breached aren't the ones with no security budget. They're the ones who bought a little security here and a little security there, and assumed it added up to real protection.

It doesn't. Security is not additive. You can't buy antivirus from one vendor, email filtering from another, and identity protection from a third, and expect the result to be as good as an integrated stack. The gaps between tools are where attacks get through.

Business Premium closes those gaps by design. It's not just a bundle of features — it's a coordinated security stack where each component reinforces the others. And for $22 a user, it's the cheapest comprehensive security platform available to small businesses.

Why now is the time to move

Here's the practical takeaway: if you're on Business Basic or Business Standard and your renewal is coming up after July 1, you're about to get a price increase. You have a window to do something about it.

Moving to Business Premium before your renewal locks you in at $22 — a price that didn't go up — while upgrading your security and device management at the same time. If you've been putting off tightening up your company's security posture, the pricing update just gave you a reason and a budget for it in the same conversation.

And if you're already on Premium? You just got a raise. More storage, no price hike, new Copilot features, and the gap between you and everyone else just got wider.

Here's the specific advice I'd give any business right now:

If you're on Business Basic: You're going from $6 to $7 — an extra dollar per user per month for 50GB more mailbox storage and SafeLinks Lite. Not bad. But if you have more than 3 employees, look hard at Premium. The jump from Basic to Premium is $15, and you get everything.

If you're on Business Standard: This is the easiest call. You're going from $12.50 to $14. The jump to Premium is $8. Intune alone costs $8. You are essentially getting Defender, Entra ID P1, Azure Information Protection, and full SafeLinks for free. Just do it.

If you're on Apps for Business: You're paying $10 a month for desktop apps with no email, no Teams, no SharePoint. Business Standard is $14. Unless you have a very specific reason to be on Apps for Business, you should move to Standard at minimum — and Premium is the smarter long-term play.

If you're already on Premium: Stay put. You're in the best position in the Microsoft 365 lineup right now.

What this says about where Microsoft is heading

The pricing strategy here tells you something important. Microsoft is making a clear statement: they want businesses on Premium. They're not raising the price because they want adoption to increase naturally as the other plans become less competitive.

And the reason isn't hard to figure out. A customer on Premium is more secure, more productive, and more embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem. They're less likely to churn, less likely to have a security incident that makes headlines, and more likely to adopt additional Microsoft services down the line.

Microsoft benefits when you're on Premium. But here's the thing: so do you. This is one of those rare situations where the vendor's interests and the customer's interests actually align. They want you more secure. You want to be more secure. The economics just got friendlier. There aren't many win-wins in software licensing. This is one of them.

At Marcoby, we help businesses make the most of their Microsoft 365 investment — whether that means migrating to the right plan, securing your devices with Intune, or managing the whole thing so you don't have to. Check out our Catalyst 365 management plans if you'd rather have someone handle this for you.

For more on keeping your business secure, read about the new wave of phishing attacks targeting SMBs and how the right tools can stop them before they reach your team.