Office suites pricing: plans, fees and buying questions

You cannot buy a word processor. You buy a package with a word processor in it, and the package also contains storage, and usually mail, and often meetings, chat, forms, and an administrative console.

That has a specific consequence for cost. The suite is only cheap if you would otherwise have bought the other things in it, and it is only expensive if you are paying twice for something you already have. Almost every mistake in this category is a failure to work out which of those is true, so this page starts there.

What to take away

• Price the bundle against what it replaces. A suite that saves money and forces you to keep a separate subscription for one component has not saved money.
• Audit what you are already paying for before you buy. Overlapping subscriptions are the most common avoidable cost in this category.
• The unit is not always a person. Ask what counts as a user, how many devices are included, and whether there is a different rate class for staff who are not at a desk.
• Work out what stops working if you stop paying. That answer, not the monthly figure, is what you are really committing to.

Start with what you already pay for

Before comparing any offer, list every subscription your organization currently holds that a suite might replace: storage, mail, meetings, chat, e-signature, form building, simple project tracking, note taking. Include the ones bought on a departmental card, because those are the ones nobody counts.

Then mark each one: replaced by the suite, kept alongside it, or a decision to make. Three things fall out of this exercise, and each is worth money.

The first is the overlap you are already paying for twice, which frequently exists before any new purchase. The second is an honest comparison denominator: the suite costs what it costs minus what it genuinely retires. The third is the trap, which is a component in the bundle that is good enough on paper and not good enough in practice, so you keep the separate subscription and pay for both. Meetings and project tracking are the usual candidates, and the way to find out is to test the bundled version against the standard your team already has, not against nothing.

What counts as a user

Per person pricing looks simple until you meet the edges.

• Named user or shared use. Whether a license belongs to a person or can be attached to a shared workstation matters for anyone with shift workers, a reception desk, or a shared machine on a shop floor.
• Devices per license. How many machines one person may install on, whether a phone counts, and what happens when someone has a laptop, a desktop, and a tablet.
• Rate classes. Ask whether different rates exist for staff who do not sit at a desk, for contractors, for volunteers, or for organizations of your legal type. Do not assume; ask, because these are rarely on the front page and the eligibility conditions matter.
• Accounts that are not people. Shared mailboxes, a reception account, a machine that generates reports. Whether these consume a full license is the same question that dominates a mail cost model, and the answer is often different here.
• People who need only part of the bundle. Someone who reads documents and never edits one may or may not need a full license. Ask what a read and comment level costs, and whether it exists at all.

Count your organization in these terms before you look at any headline rate. The count is usually not your headcount, in either direction.

Storage is a pool, and pools drain

Suites usually give storage as an allowance that the organization shares. That is generous until you notice what fills it. Most of what fills it is material nobody decided to keep, and the discipline that fixes it is deciding retention by class of content rather than by remaining room, which is the logic behind published records control schedules.

• Video and design files, which are orders of magnitude larger than documents and arrive without warning when one team starts producing them.
• Version history, which is a feature you want and which consumes space in proportion to how actively a file is edited.
• Deleted items inside their recovery window, which are still occupying the allowance.
• The documents of people who have left, which nobody deletes because nobody is sure what is in them.
• Anything a synchronizing client has copied in bulk from somewhere else.

The questions worth asking are what counts toward the allowance, what happens when it is reached, and how additional capacity is priced. The last one is the important one: capacity is often sold in blocks at a rate that makes the original allowance look like a promotion. If your work involves media at all, price the storage separately and treat the file storage arrangement as its own decision rather than as a bundled extra.

The other half of that question is what happens to the copy the supplier still holds after you leave. Ask, and get the answer in writing, because disposal is genuinely harder than storage, which is the premise of the published media sanitization guidelines.

Understand what stops when you stop

This is the question that distinguishes a subscription from a purchase, and most people never ask it.

If you stop paying, do the applications stop opening? Do they continue in a limited mode? Do your documents remain readable, and where do they live? Is there any arrangement under which you retain the software you have already paid for?

Then ask the same question about the storage. Documents you can no longer reach are worse than documents in an awkward format, and the window between cancellation and deletion is a real number you should know in advance.

None of this argues against subscriptions, which are the norm and are often the better arrangement. It argues for knowing what the arrangement is, because the answer determines how much room you have to negotiate at every renewal for the next decade. It is also the part of the calculation that the cost of switching sits on top of.

Fill in your own model

Obtain each figure yourself from current published terms. The fields are what matter here; the numbers change constantly.

Line	What to enter
People needing a full license	After separating readers from editors
People needing a reduced license	If such a level exists
Non human accounts	And whether each consumes a license
Devices per person	And whether your actual pattern fits the allowance
Rate classes you may qualify for	Ask; do not assume
Storage used today	Measured, including version history and deleted items
Storage in three years	With any media production you expect
Additional capacity	Priced per block, at the rate that applies after the included allowance
Tier required	Set by administrative needs, not by application features
Add-ons	Retention, archiving, advanced analysis, anything sold separately
Subscriptions retired	Subtract these honestly, only where you will really cancel
Subscriptions kept anyway	The bundled component that is not good enough
Transition cost	Retraining, template rebuild, and any automation that must be rewritten
Term and renewal	The price you pay in year two, not year one

Run it at today's size and at your three year size. Then compare against the total you are paying now, including the departmental subscriptions, because that is the only comparison that answers the question you actually have.

Common questions

Is the cheapest tier ever the right answer?

Yes, for small teams doing short internal work with nothing to protect. It stops being the right answer at the first point where you need to recover a deleted document, control external sharing, or retrieve the files of someone who has left. Those are administrative requirements rather than application requirements, and they set the tier.

How do we handle people who only need to read documents?

Ask what the options are before you buy a full license for everyone. Many organizations pay full price for a substantial group who open documents and never create one. This is the single largest overcount in most estates.

Should we commit annually?

Annual is cheaper and usually fixes your license count for the term. If your headcount moves, check specifically how mid term additions are priced and whether any reduction is possible before renewal. The comparison discipline of converting every offer into your own units applies to term structure as much as to features.

What is the most commonly missed cost?

The transition. Retraining, rebuilt templates, and rewritten automation are real work by real people, and they land in the first year while you are also paying the subscription. Budget them explicitly rather than absorbing them, because absorbed costs are the ones that make a good decision look like a bad one.