Resellers say a 20 per cent fee will have to be paid in order to retain month-to-month subscriptions

An online petition opposing a proposed 20 per cent fee on monthly Microsoft 365 subscriptions has attracted almost 1,000 signatures.

Microsoft itself has not announced a fee of 20 per cent on flexible monthly billing, instead outlining in its New Commerce Experience operating guide that flexible subscriptions will be available on monthly terms “at a premium price”.

Several resellers have told CRN that the “premium price” will amount to a 20 per cent fee, and also claim that, as part of the agreement, UK resellers will now have to take on financial responsibility for customers if they can no longer pay for the rest of their licence agreements due to insolvency or another reason.

This has caused some to question whether they can continue selling Microsoft 365 licenses given the risk involved, with one telling CRN that they did not know whether they could “make enough margin” on CSP licensing for the “amount of risk” that comes with the changes.

The petition was set up by Bobby Guerra, CEO of Florida based solution provider Axiom, who said: “We recognise month-to-month subscriptions are invaluable to our clients as they allow flexibility to increase or decrease license counts based on their needs.

“Month-to-month subscriptions have also been an invaluable tool to help with cost reduction during COVID and other economic events. Adding an addition of 20 per cent on these types of SKUs seems almost punitive in nature and given the already 15 per cent increase is extreme.

“If this policy goes into effect, it will cause ripple effects with our vendors like Ingram, Synnex and Pax8 and many others, as they struggle to implement this change in their automatic procurement portals and try to handle the additional price change management.”

CRN reached out to Microsoft for comment on the petition but did not hear back by the time of publication.