April 8, 2026
BlogWhat Artemis II Saw Flying Past the Moon: Your Next Microsoft Bill
Your costs are about to shoot straight to the Moon — and unlike the astronauts, they’re not coming back.
On April 1, 2026, four astronauts aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft departed Earth orbit for the first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years. On April 6, they flew past the Moon at 4,067 miles above the surface, which is the closest humans have come to the lunar surface since Apollo 17 in 1972. They are on their way home now, splashing down Friday.
Your Microsoft Enterprise Agreement renewal costs are also heading to the Moon. The difference is they aren’t coming back.
Three forces are converging at EA renewal tables right now, simultaneously, in a way they never have before. If your renewal lands after July 1, 2026, all three apply to you.
Force one: the end of volume discounts
For 25 years, Microsoft’s EA offered tiered pricing based on seat count. Level D customers (those with the largest deployments) received a 12% discount from list price. These weren’t perks. They were the pricing structure enterprise IT budgets were built around.
On November 1, 2025, Microsoft eliminated this structure entirely for online services under a policy called “Online Services Pricing Consistency.” Every EA customer now pays Level A, list price, regardless of seat count. For a Level D customer, losing a 12% discount is a 13.64% base price increase before anything else changes. It arrived without a press release most finance teams ever saw.
Force two: the compliance reckoning
This one doesn’t arrive in an announcement. It arrives during your renewal conversation.
Organizations running mixed environments, such as Enterprise users on M365 E3 or E5 alongside Frontline Workers on F1 or F3, are increasingly being informed that their Frontline users have access to security and compliance features they aren’t licensed for. The exposure occurs at the tenant level. The remedy is a mandatory add-on: the Defender and Purview Suite Frontline add-on at $13.00 per user per month — effectively doubling Frontline Worker costs.
This requirement isn’t new. The enforcement is. And it surfaces at the renewal table, where you have the least room to respond to it.
A 12,500-seat manufacturer I advised recently had 12,000 Frontline Worker F3 licenses alongside their Enterprise users. The compliance gap surfaced mid-renewal. The three-year cost: $5.6 million for a requirement that had existed throughout their previous agreement without ever being raised.
Force three: the July 2026 price increases
Effective July 1, 2026: M365 E3 increases 8%, from $36.00 to $39.00 per user per month. M365 E5 increases 5%, from $57.00 to $60.00. Frontline F1 increases 33%. F3 increases 25%.
For organizations renewing after July 1, all three forces apply simultaneously. The math compounds in one direction.
What to do before your renewal conversation begins
Three actions matter most, and all three require time you may not have if you wait until the quote arrives.
Demand price transparency: base price, discount applied, resulting price, in writing, line by line, before you sign. If your representative cannot produce this, that is information.
Audit your Frontline Worker licensing configuration against Microsoft’s current tenant compliance requirements now. By the time it surfaces at the renewal table, your leverage to negotiate it has largely passed.
Test the market. Microsoft licensing is transactable through hundreds of authorized Cloud Solution Providers. Competitive bids from the channel produce material differences in the post-volume-discount environment. Run the process before you sit down at the EA table, not after.
Microsoft licensing is a seven- or eight-figure procurement decision. It deserves the same competitive rigor applied to every other spend category at this scale. The renewal quote will be reassuring. The math may not be.
