Microsoft is back price gouging with the big US software Company jacking up the price of their annual subscriptions, the price rises apply to all customer segments including small business, commercial, academic, and even non-profits according to emails seen by ChannelNews.

The 5% price hike will come into effect, in Australia from the 1st of April 2025 with Microsoft increasing both new and renewing monthly billed annual subscriptions over what customers currently pay.

The big software Company whose constant changes to office 365 and Windows 11 is annoying millions of their customers claims that their software now has new AI features.

At least one Australian customer has asked the consumer watchdog, the ACCC, to investigate the matter.

Legal experts say price gouging in itself isn’t illegal but if a company raises prices aggressively and makes false or misleading claims about its prices, this would be illegal.

A visit to the Microsoft partner site reveals that Microsoft is standardising their billing structure with the introduction of their latest pricing update.

They claim that customers can elect to change their billing plan from monthly to upfront billing, priced five percent lower than the updated monthly billing option, at their renewal date.* Starting on March 10, 2025, customers on end-of-sale (EOS) and EOS with Conversion offers, such as Microsoft 365 E3/E5 and Office 365 E1/E3/E5 suites with Teams, can schedule a change to edit the billing frequencies for their annual subscriptions at renewal.

In what is clear PR spin Microsoft claims “Most of our 84 million consumer subscribers will now have access to Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, and the newly renamed Microsoft 365 Copilot app.”

As of April 2025, subscription to Microsoft 365 — which includes popular apps such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook — now costs $159 per year in Australia for a personal licence, up from $109 per year.

The fee for a family subscription has increased from $139 per year to $179 per year.

For those on a monthly personal subscription, the price rose from $11 to $16 a month.

According to Brennan IT the potential impact for Microsoft business customers is as follows:

• If your licenses are under an annual commitment, current pricing will remain the same throughout this period (regardless of whether you are billed monthly or paid upfront).

• The 5% price increase will be applied at the time of the renewal or new subscriptions for annual commitment, with monthly payment options.

• If your licenses are on a month-to-month payment, there will be no changes to your pricing.

What license types are impacted?
• All annual and triennial term subscriptions with monthly billing plans.
• All segments
• All New Commerce Experience 365 products
What Categories are not impacted?
• Azure Subscriptions
• On-premises software (Perpetual & Software Subscriptions)