If you get your non-profit Office 365 licenses from us, you may have recently received an email from Microsoft announcing the upcoming discontinuation of the Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Office 365 E1 grants. Basically, what this means is that the unlimited Office 365 E1 and 10 freebie licenses of Microsoft 365 Business Premium are going to be going away soon. Donated Microsoft 365 Business Basic licenses are not affected by this change, and you can still use up to 300 of those for email-only access.
Existing Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Office 365 E1 grant recipients can continue service through their next renewal on or after July 1, 2025. For most of our clients, that renewal will occur in September, 2025. After that point, you’ll be paying the following for these licenses:
- Microsoft Office 365 E1 (Nonprofit Pricing): $3.00/seat/month (commercial pricing is $12/month).
- Microsoft 365 Business Premium (Nonprofit Pricing): $6.60/seat/month (commercial pricing is $26.40/month).
We use Microsoft 365 Business Premium as our license of choice for our clients as it includes pretty much everything that a user needs, so that license really can’t be replaced (in our opinion) and we recommend non-profits budget the extra $66.00/month for those ten seats.
As for the E1 licenses, we do have a handful of non-profit clients that are using Office 365 E1 licenses and we will be exploring those situations to see if the Business Basic license will work for those clients’ needs or if the donation Business Basic license will suffice. You can see Microsoft’s table of what’s included in E1 but not in Business Basic by reading their document on the matter, but basically the biggest thing the E1 supports that you might use is On-premises Active Directory sync for Single Sign On (SSO). That feature is not supported in Business Basic. So as it stands right now, if you have an on-premises server that you authenticate or manage users with, you’ll need to continue to use the E1 licenses. We’ll work with clients affected by this to confirm that feature is needed and will work with you as needed.
If you have any questions at all about this or any other Office 365 questions, don’t hesitate to let us know!