Microsoft 365 for nonprofits: what you get, what it costs, and where it quietly leaks.

On this page

• What the nonprofit grant gives you
• What changed, now the free era is ending
• The plans, in plain language
• The leak nobody was asked to watch
• How to check it yourself, in about an hour
• What good offboarding looks like
• When it is worth paying someone
• IT support for nonprofits, and what we do instead
• If you would rather we just did it

What the nonprofit grant gives you

Microsoft runs a nonprofit program. If your organization is registered as a charity or a nonprofit in your country, you apply once, Microsoft verifies you, and after that your account is flagged as a nonprofit account. Two things follow.

First, a number of seats at the entry level cost you nothing. Email, calendar, files, Teams, all in the browser. For a lot of small organizations that alone covers the whole team.

Second, the paid plans above that come at a real discount, well below what a business pays for the same thing. Not a token five percent. A serious cut.

Verification takes a few weeks and it is a one-time job. If nobody at your organization has ever done it, that is the highest-value hour on this page. You may be paying full commercial price for something you are entitled to at a fraction of it.

What changed, now the free era is ending

For years an organization with charity status could run a small team on the full Microsoft 365 business plan for nothing. That era is closing. Microsoft has been winding down the most generous part of the grant, the part that covered the complete plan including the security and device controls. Free seats still exist at the entry level, and the discounts on the paid plans are still real and still worth claiming. But more and more nonprofits now open an invoice where they used to open nothing.

We are deliberately not printing seat counts and percentages on this page. They have already changed more than once and they will change again. Check the current terms inside your own admin center at renewal time, and treat any article older than a few months, including this one, as out of date on the exact numbers.

Here is the useful part. A renewal invoice is not bad news if you know what is on it. Most organizations arriving at their first paid renewal are not paying for the team they have. They are paying for the team they had, plus everyone who left, plus a few plans somebody bought to be safe. The invoice is only the moment you finally look.

Money you already have is the cheapest money there is. It needs no proposal, no donor, and no board approval to earn.

The plans, in plain language

Entry

Browser only

Email, calendar, files, Teams and the Office apps in a web browser. Nothing installed on the laptop. This is the tier where nonprofit seats are cheapest, often free. It is genuinely enough for a lot of people: field staff, volunteers, part-time coordinators, anyone who lives in email and shared documents.

Full business plan

Apps plus security and device controls

Everything above, plus Word, Excel and Outlook installed on the laptop, plus the controls that matter: who can sign in, from which device, what happens when a laptop goes missing, and stronger protection against the fake-invoice emails that target finance teams. This is the plan most organizations were getting free and are now being asked to pay for.

Enterprise

For larger organizations

More compliance, retention and reporting features, sold per user, generally worth it only once you have hundreds of staff or a funder asking hard questions about how records are kept.

The most expensive mistake here is not the price of a plan. It is the mix. Organizations put everybody on the full plan because it is simpler to buy one thing, when half the team only ever opens a browser. Assign the plan to the job, not to the person's seniority. Getting the mix right is usually a bigger saving than negotiating the price.

The leak nobody was asked to watch

Nobody wastes this money on purpose. It builds up one small, reasonable decision at a time.

• Someone leaves during a busy month. The account stays, because deleting things feels risky. The license keeps billing, every month, quietly.
• A new person joins and a fresh license gets bought, because finding and reassigning the old one takes longer than clicking buy.
• A project needs a tool "just to be safe" and nobody sets a date to check whether it is still needed.
• Shared addresses, the info@ inbox, the old database login, the account the printer uses, sit on full paid plans they never needed.
• A country office buys its own seats on its own card, and nobody ever sees both bills on the same page.

There is a word for this, and it is the buyer's own word, not ours: shelfware. Software that gets bought and never opened. One 2025 study across a wide sample of companies found that fifteen percent of the apps they paid for were never opened, not once. Microsoft 365 is usually the biggest single shelfware line in the building, because it is the one nobody remembers to check.

Do that thirty or forty times over a few years, which is completely normal because good people move on, and you are paying every month for staff who left long ago. Your own number takes one line to work out: count the quiet accounts, then multiply by the yearly price of the plan each one sits on. Whatever that comes to is money you already have.

And it is nobody's fault. It is a boring, invisible task that was never written into anyone's job description, right up until the day it is worth thousands.

How to check it yourself, in about an hour

You do not need us for this. If you have admin rights and a quiet afternoon, you can do the whole thing and keep every dollar you find.

One safety note. Removing a license and blocking sign-in is reversible. Deleting the account is where email and files get lost. If people still write to that address, turn the mailbox into a shared mailbox first, which does not need a paid license, and only then remove the license. Never delete an account in the same session you found it.

What good offboarding looks like

Finding the leak once feels great. Then it fills back up, because the leak is not a licensing problem. It is a leaving problem. Good offboarding is not a policy document nobody reads. It is a short checklist that one named person owns, and it starts the day a leaving date is known, not the week after somebody has gone.

• HR tells IT the leaving date. This is the step that fails most often, and notice that it is not a technical step at all.
• On the last day, block sign-in. One click. That is the security part done.
• Hand the files over before anything else: move their documents to their manager while you still know where they are.
• If people still email that address, convert the mailbox to a shared mailbox. Nothing is lost, and a shared mailbox does not need a paid license.
• Then remove the license and return it to the pool, ready for the next person who joins.
• Remove them from the groups, the shared drives, the CRM, the finance portal, the social accounts. Keep one written list of everything a person gets access to, so nobody has to remember it under pressure.
• Put a reminder ninety days out to close the account properly.

The gain is not only the money. It is that the next departure costs you ten calm minutes instead of a year of quiet billing, and the person who leaves takes no knowledge out of the door with them.

When it is worth paying someone

Honest answer, because we would rather you trusted the page than bought something you do not need.

Do it yourself if you are under about fifty people, on one Microsoft 365 account, and somebody can give it an afternoon. It is genuinely not hard. The steps above are the whole method, and the money you find is yours.

Bring someone in if you have several hundred seats, or more than one Microsoft 365 account left over from a merger or a country office, or licenses bought by different offices on different cards, or a set of other software bills nobody has ever compared. And bring someone in if you have opened that admin center twice and closed it again because the day ran away from you. That last one is the most common reason of all, and it is not a personal failing. It is what happens when the IT sits on top of a full-time job.

IT support for nonprofits, and what we do instead

Most managed IT services for nonprofits sell you a helpdesk: a number to ring when the laptop will not print, plus patching, backups, and someone watching the alerts. That is a real service and plenty of organizations need it. If that is what you need, we will say so on the first call, and we are happy to tell you what to look for.

Prodigi does something different. We put every provider you pay on one page: the IT company, the web agency, the CRM consultant, the fundraising platform. One senior person, reporting to you, who puts what each of them is actually delivering side by side, so you can see the whole picture on one page and decide what to renew. Then we install what needs installing, we train your team to use it, and we run it until they can run it without us.

Diagnose, Install, Train, Run. That is the whole method, and we are not bidding for your providers' work. Anything we find that needs building, we quote separately or hand to a partner.

Some of what we know here comes from running it, not reading about it. We have run Microsoft 365 for an international NGO working across four countries, under contract. We have sat on the inside of the license list, the reseller invoice and the leavers nobody removed, which is why we can describe the inside of an organization like yours honestly.

Only Microsoft to look at, and under about fifty people? Then the hour above is genuinely enough, and the money you find is yours. Most organizations that run this once want someone still watching after, so the same leak does not quietly reopen: Ops care at $490 a month, or a membership, your part-time head of technology, both on the consulting page.

Questions people ask.

Further reading: The license leak most organizations never audit, a shorter field note on why this happens and why it is nobody's fault. More of these on our field notes page, and the story behind Prodigi is on the about page.