How Microsoft's New Licensing Model Impacts You – and How to Prepare with vScope
Anton Berghult • Starting November 2025, Microsoft will remove volume discounts in Enterprise Agreement, MPSA, and OSPA. In this article, we explain what the change means for your organization, and how vScope helps you gain full visibility and control of licenses and costs across your environment.
Starting November 1, 2025, Microsoft will introduce a new pricing model for enterprise customers. The traditional volume discounts in Enterprise Agreement (EA), MPSA, and OSPA will be discontinued, and all customers will pay the standard list price (Level A), regardless of organization size.
The change won’t take effect for everyone at once. It applies at your next agreement renewal after November 1, 2025, or when adding new online services not already covered by an existing contract. For many organizations, the impact will first be noticeable in 2026 as renewals or expansions take place.
What does the change mean?
Previously, large organizations with thousands of users could receive discounts between 6% and 12% through higher EA levels (B–D). That is now being completely phased out. Whether you have 200 or 20,000 users, the same list price applies.
Microsoft states that the goal is to increase consistency and transparency across different licensing channels, aligning EA pricing with how Azure is already priced. At the same time, this leads to higher per-user costs and a shift in responsibility, from negotiation to optimization. Read more: Microsoft Online Services: Pricing Consistency Update
What it means for IT and licensing managers
In short: you can no longer rely on negotiation to keep costs down. Instead, you’ll need to continuously optimize and understand your license usage, well ahead of each renewal cycle.
That means being able to answer questions like:
- How many Microsoft 365 licenses are actually used each month?
- Which users have the wrong license type — or show no activity at all?
- How much are inactive accounts costing us?
- Which departments or user groups drive unnecessary spending?
Without those answers, each renewal becomes a guessing game, and you risk over-purchasing licenses that don’t reflect your real needs.
How to prepare today
This change means it’s time to re-evaluate your licensing management practices. Some actions can be taken right away, while others require a bit more planning and collaboration.
1. Review your current license allocation Identify licenses assigned to inactive accounts, or those that are unassigned altogether. This is often where quick savings can be found.
2. Adjust license levels By analyzing how different user groups utilize Microsoft 365, you can downgrade unnecessarily expensive licenses (for example, E5 → E3 or F3). License allocation should always reflect real usage.
3. Strengthen collaboration between IT and the business Effective license management requires insights from IT, finance, and procurement. When everyone sees the same numbers, decisions become faster and more accurate.
4. Be proactive Establish an ongoing optimization routine with scheduled reports, alerts, and continuous monitoring ahead of each renewal.
How vScope helps you manage the change
As Microsoft’s volume discounts disappear, data-driven license management becomes essential. That’s where vScope comes in, a platform designed to collect, structure, and visualize IT data in a way that makes license management simple and fact-based.
Full visibility into license usage
vScope scans daily across your Microsoft 365 environment (and much more…), keeping all information automatically updated. With ready-to-use reports built by our experts, you instantly see how licenses are assigned, which are active, and where overlaps or duplicates exist.
Cost control with Billing
vScope Billing provides a clear cost breakdown per user, department, customer, or any other context. You decide how to present cost insights, to the business, management, or clients, and can simulate how usage changes impact total cost.
Data-driven optimization
With detailed insights into activity and license allocation, you can quickly:
- identify unused accounts (…and save money!),
- adjust license levels (e.g., E5 → E3 or F3),
- and prepare fact-based reports for your next EA renewal.
Stronger collaboration between IT, finance, and stakeholders
vScope builds a shared view of your organization’s reality, same numbers, same data. IT gains control over usage, finance gains predictability in costs, and stakeholders get precise reporting.
Take control before the price increase hits
The change on November 1, 2025, means license management will be less about volume — and more about transparency and precision. With vScope, you get the tools to meet this new reality with facts instead of assumptions, create a proactive license management routine, and ensure every license you pay for is used effectively.
Want to see how vScope can help your organization prepare for Microsoft’s new pricing model? Schedule a Demo and we will show you how!
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