Microsoft’s 2026 pricing changes have been written about at length, and none of us can do anything about the list prices themselves. What is worth your attention is the part still under your control: how many seats you are actually paying for, which tier each of those seats sits on, when your term renews, and who you buy through.
In the licensing reviews we run, savings come from the same four places almost every time. None of them are clever. All of them are routinely missed.
1. Seats nobody is using
The most common finding and the least interesting one: licences still assigned to people who left, to contractors whose project finished, or to shared mailboxes that never needed a full licence. Offboarding processes tend to cover the security side properly — the account gets disabled — and the billing side not at all. The licence keeps renewing quietly for years.
This is worth checking before any negotiation, because it changes the size of the estate you are negotiating over.
2. Tiers that no longer match the work
Estates drift. Someone gets moved to a higher tier for a project and never gets moved back. A whole department sits on a plan built around desktop applications when what they actually need is email, Teams and a browser. Occasionally the reverse is true and people are on a plan that quietly forces a workaround.
Right-tiering is not about downgrading everyone. It is about the plan matching the job, in both directions.
3. Term and renewal timing
Commitment term, renewal date and the treatment of mid-term changes all affect what you pay, and they are the easiest thing to get wrong because they are decided once and then forgotten. A subscription that rolls over automatically on a date nobody has in their calendar is a subscription nobody is negotiating.
Knowing your renewal dates before the quarter they fall in is most of the work.
4. The channel you buy through
Microsoft licensing can be bought directly or through a Cloud Solution Provider partner. Partners receive a discount from Microsoft, and what happens to that discount varies enormously: some keep all of it, some pass part of it back.
We publish ours rather than leaving it to a negotiation. Depending on the size of the estate, Lorexus passes back up to 4% for 10–25 seats, rising to up to 12% at 300 seats and above. Actual savings depend on product type, licensing model and eligibility — partner margin is not uniform across every SKU, and we would rather say that up front than surprise anyone at quoting stage.
What a review actually involves
We look at your current licensing, identify which of the four categories above apply to your estate, and give you a written view of what you would save and how. There is no obligation attached, and if the honest answer is that you are already well set up and should stay where you are, that is the answer you will get.
If you want to start with the numbers rather than a conversation, the details and the request form are here: Reduce your Microsoft 365 costs.