Haven’t been able to verify this through Google search, but rep at CCB sent me this:
Microsoft announced that on March 1, the majority of Open Charity products will significantly increase in price, averaging 50% with some as high as 300%.
Anyone else heard anything about this and what products are going to increase?
I’ve heard of increases coming for the open charity stuff. But I haven’t seen specifics.
And I have NOT heard of any changes to non-profit pricing for Office 365.
I’d love to know what others are hearing/seeing on this front too.
Microsoft’s trajectory is Microsoft 365 for getting your Windows enterprise, mobility/intune/dual factor auth, and Office 365. I’m an MS partner but I only get a heads up for changes in the pricing for cloud services so I can’t really confirm it, but it doesn’t surprise me at all given their new focus on Windows/O365 as a service and they would much rather have pretty much everyone on Microsoft 365.
Here’s an excerpt from the email, highlighting some of the changes:
How will the current Microsoft Software Donation Program on TechSoup change on April 1st? Product Selection: Microsoft is optimizing its ‘on-premises’ product donations to meet the needs of smaller organizations. Standard versions of all Microsoft ‘on-premises’ products will continue to be available as donations to eligible nonprofits and libraries through TechSoup. Premium versions of Microsoft ‘on-premises’ products will no longer be available as donated offers on TechSoup, but will be available with the same eligibility at a nonprofit discount. There are no changes to donated cloud offers available from Microsoft.
Choice across all Donated Products on TechSoup: Starting April 1st, you can now choose among any Microsoft donated products for your licensing without being limited by 10 title groups.
Program Rules and Eligibility Stay the Same: Microsoft eligibility for donated offers through TechSoup remains the same. These same eligibility rules are standardized across any source of Microsoft nonprofit discounts. Donated license limits available over a 2-year cycle remain the same through TechSoup.
Assistance Learning About & Accessing Options: Microsoft’s improvements and changes offer nonprofits a range of donations, discounts and licensing options. TechSoup is committed to helping you understand the best options for your needs – whether donated or discounted, ‘on-premises’, cloud or hybrid. Where possible, we will provide direct access in one easy place.
New and Noteworthy at microsoft.com/nonprofits: In case you missed it in the blog post by Microsoft, we’re ‘calling out’ these exciting new direct offers for nonprofits you can get from Microsoft – an Office 365 volunteer SKU, an expansion of Microsoft 365 with E3 and E5 offers, and Microsoft Surface to 10 new markets.
In Slack our assumption is that Premium would generally mean anything above whatever the “acceptable base tier” would be. For example:
Windows Pro for Workstation
Windows Server Datacenter
SQL Server Enterprise
Microsoft is making it very clear to their customers that the Cloud is going to be the way forward, so I’d expect over time they may further erode their on-premise donations. I’m not sure if there are any changes to Open Charity planned or announced, but it seems that’s going to be the route forward for those who have workloads that can’t be adopted into The Cloud yet.
If you see a near-term need for them, that’s probably a reasonable decision. Long-term we’ll all probably have to figure out how to adopt the new way of life once it catches up to our needs, but short-term I certainly plan to stay in the traditional world.
I’m with Alex here, I’d only stock up if I planned to have a use in the next year or so and only if I had a larger church office (at least more than 50 staff). For the small/medium church offices, their track over the next few years is going to be toward the cloud.
I have filled out contact forms three times with Techsoup to ask for clarity between Standard and Premium versions and have yet to hear back from anyone.
I am from TechSoup and happened to pick up on this thread so let me try to provide some information. (And apologize publically to Craig for being too slow to respond to his queries - truly sorry!) Microsoft uses the language of having the goal of ‘optimizing’ the ‘on-premises’ product donation catalog to suit nonprofits with under 50 users. I haven’t seen an exact definition of standard vs. premium, but from our work with them, I believe what is meant here by Microsoft is that the core offerings will be donated (think Office Standard or Project or Sharepoint Server Standard) and premium offers (think Office Professional which includes more products or enterprise editions like Exchange Server Enterprise) will move to Open discounts. I hope this answers the question. Happy to provide further information if helpful to you.
A new thread has been started with more information on the future roadmap of price increases. tl;dr expect legacy pricing to continue to get more expensive as Microsoft pushes Office 365 and other subscription licensing options.