Teams Out of Office: What Microsoft's Unbundling Means for Your Licences

Since 1 November 2025, Microsoft Teams is no longer a default part of the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites. There are now versions without Teams at a lower price – and Teams as a standalone product that you license separately. The background is an EU antitrust case that the European Commission closed in September 2025 with commitments from Microsoft that are legally binding for seven years. It was triggered by a 2023 complaint from competitor Slack.

At HELITS we manage the Microsoft 365 environments of SMEs across the Berchtesgaden and Traunstein region and the wider DACH area. Since the change, almost every licensing conversation now opens with the same question: "Do we have to change anything now?" The short answer: usually not straight away – but it is worth taking a proper look. This article sets out what has actually changed and what it means in practice.

What the EU case was about

For years, Microsoft bundled Teams tightly into its Office suites. Anyone licensing Microsoft 365 got Teams more or less automatically – at no extra charge, but also with no real choice. From the perspective of competitors such as Slack or Zoom, this was a market advantage that had little to do with the product itself: Teams was simply already there. The European Commission viewed this as unlawful tying.

Microsoft then offered commitments, which the Commission made legally binding on 12 September 2025. In essence, they mean:

• Suites without Teams at an appreciably lower price than the versions with Teams.
• Teams as a standalone product that anyone can add separately.
• Switching options for existing customers – including within ongoing multi-year contracts.
• Interoperability: competing solutions should be able to connect to Microsoft features more easily.
• Data portability: Teams messaging data can be exported and moved into competing solutions.

The tying commitments apply for seven years; the interoperability and data export parts for ten years. Geographically, the rules cover the European Economic Area (EEA) – so they apply to your business in Bavaria just as much as to sites in Austria or in Switzerland within an EEA context.

The new pricing logic: cheaper without Teams, Teams costs extra

The principle is simple. The suites with Teams largely keep their previous price. What is new are the versions without Teams, which are cheaper. The EU set minimum price gaps so that the discount for the Teams-free version is not merely token. Depending on the suite and on Microsoft's published list prices, these gaps are roughly in the following range:

• Enterprise plans (e.g. Microsoft 365 E3/E5, Office 365 E3/E5): around 8 euros per user per month.
• Business Standard and Premium plus Office 365 E1: around 3 euros.
• Business Basic: around 1.50 euros.
• Frontline (F3): around 1 euro.

Important: these are the regulatory minimum gaps as published by Microsoft, not guaranteed final prices. The actual amounts vary by country, currency and contract route (CSP, Enterprise Agreement) and can change. For your specific licence, always have the current list price confirmed.

Teams as a standalone product costs at least around 8 euros per user per month in the enterprise version – exactly the gap you save on the Teams-free suite. That is no coincidence: anyone who wants to keep using Teams ends up paying roughly what they did before. The difference is transparency, not necessarily savings.

Do you have to switch now? Three typical situations

In our licensing conversations, three scenarios keep emerging:

1. You use Teams actively and intensively. Then there is no rush. Your existing suite with Teams keeps running. At the next renewal you should simply check whether the bundled version is still offered for your plan and whether your invoice reflects everything cleanly. You do not have to switch.

2. You barely use Teams, or not at all. This is where unbundling means real money. In practice we see a surprising number of businesses that license Teams but actually communicate by phone, a classic telephone system or another platform. Here, moving to a suite without Teams can ease the budget noticeably depending on headcount – with 30 enterprise users, an 8-euro difference per month quickly adds up to several thousand euros a year.

3. You are locked into a multi-year contract. Even then you are not trapped. Microsoft has committed to give EEA customers on multi-year contracts an annual opportunity to switch between bundled and unbundled versions – currently through to 2030. The exact switching window and conditions should be clarified individually with your licensing partner.

The alternatives question: is this the moment to rethink Teams?

Unbundling makes one question honest for the first time: what does Teams cost us – and is it worth it? As long as Teams came "for free" with the suite, hardly anyone asked. Now there is a concrete figure next to it.

Our experience: for most SMEs, Teams remains the pragmatic choice because it is deeply integrated into everyday Microsoft work – calendar, SharePoint, files, meetings. Moving to Slack, Zoom or Google Workspace is technically possible (the new interoperability and data-export commitments deliberately make it easier), but it means training effort and process change. That is only worth taking on if there is a genuine substantive reason – not just because of 8 euros.

More interesting for many businesses is a different thought: separating Teams from Office makes it visible that communication is a discipline in its own right – with its own costs, its own technology and its own requirements. If you mainly use Teams for telephony and meetings anyway, it is worth checking whether a well-designed telephony and communication solution – whether via Teams Phone, a cloud telephone system or a combination – is not cheaper and more reliable than whatever grew historically. This is exactly the kind of stocktake we like to run with clients before the next licence renewal comes due.

Our recommendation for existing M365 customers

Distilled from our work in the Berchtesgaden region, our approach looks like this:

1. Take stock. Which licences do you actually hold – and which suite (with or without Teams) is currently on your invoice? For many clients the reality differs from the assumption.
2. Measure usage. Who uses Teams for what? Microsoft 365 provides usage reports for this. If whole departments never open Teams, that is a clear signal.
3. Run the numbers. A suite without Teams plus, where needed, standalone Teams for the departments that truly require it – depending on the split, that can be cheaper than the blanket bundle for everyone.
4. Check the contract. When does your contract end, and when is the next switching window? Only then can a move be timed cleanly.
5. Do not rush. There is no deadline by which you must act. But there is a good moment – your next renewal.

Microsoft's unbundling is no cause for alarm, but a good reason to recalculate your own licensing and communication setup properly. That is precisely part of our IT consulting and digitalisation advice: not selling you the next tool, but checking what you really need. And if you happen to have the wider regulatory picture on your radar, we also recommend our piece on NIS2 for Bavarian SMEs – because licensing and security questions are more closely linked than many assume.

If you want to know whether unbundling means real money or pure bookkeeping for your business, we are happy to work it through with you – based on your actual licences, not on a spreadsheet.

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