Article
What Microsoft 365 actually costs a 10-person Canadian business — Business Basic, Standard, and Premium pricing in CAD, plus the hidden costs and licence-mix savings most owners never get walked through.
Microsoft’s pricing pages list a sticker price in CAD next to each Business plan, and on a good day that gets you about halfway to a real budget. The other half is figuring out which plan you actually need, where the silently-required add-ons live, and whether the same plan really suits everyone on your team.
Most of the 10-person businesses we talk to overpay for Microsoft 365 — sometimes by a third, sometimes more — because nobody walked them through the choices. They were either sold the safest top-tier plan for the entire team “just in case,” or they were steered into the cheapest option and ended up paying separately for the bits Microsoft would have bundled at one tier up.
This is a plain-language walk through the actual numbers for a 10-person company in Canadian dollars: which plans matter, what they really include, the costs people forget, and the licence mix that most often turns out to be cheapest.
Pricing throughout this post reflects the listed CAD rates at microsoft.com/en-ca as of [verify current CAD pricing at microsoft.com/en-ca]. Microsoft adjusts these from time to time — confirm against the current Compare Plans page before you commit.
Microsoft’s Business family has four plans. For a Canadian SMB at this size, three of them cover almost every situation: Business Basic, Business Standard, and Business Premium. The fourth, Apps for Business, is just the desktop Office apps with no email and no Teams; it is rarely the right answer for a whole company because most teams want at least Teams for chat and a shared calendar.
You will also see “Microsoft 365 E3” and “E5” advertised. Those are the enterprise plans, designed for organisations above 300 users, gated by minimum commitments at most resellers, and almost always overkill for a business under 50 people. Skip them unless you have a specific compliance requirement that genuinely will not fit Premium.
Annual-commitment pricing per user, rounded to the nearest cent. [verify current CAD pricing at microsoft.com/en-ca]
| Plan | Per user / month | Annual / 10 users | What’s included | Common surprises (NOT included) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Business Basic | $7.20 | $864 | Web/mobile Office apps, Exchange (50 GB mailbox), Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint | No desktop Word/Excel/Outlook — only browser/mobile |
| Business Standard | $15.00 | $1,800 | Everything in Basic, plus desktop Office apps, Microsoft Bookings, and Loop | No Intune, no Defender for Business, no Microsoft Entra ID P1 |
| Business Premium | $26.40 | $3,168 | Everything in Standard, plus Intune device management, Defender for Business, Microsoft Entra ID P1 (formerly Azure AD Premium P1), and Defender for Office 365 P1 | Backup is still not included — Microsoft retention is not a backup |
A few things worth knowing before you read further:
The sticker price is not the whole story. Most 10-person businesses we audit have one or more of these costs on top of the base licence — and they would often be cheaper folded into a different plan choice than handled separately.
Backup. Microsoft’s “retention” features are useful for accidental deletes inside a defined retention window. They are not a backup. If a malicious admin or a rogue script empties a mailbox, deletes a OneDrive folder, or wipes a SharePoint library, native retention will not save you in every case. A proper third-party backup tool — Veeam, AvePoint, Dropsuite, or similar — is usually $3 to $5 CAD per user per month. For 10 users, that is another $360–$600 per year.
Email security beyond the defaults. Exchange Online includes Exchange Online Protection, which catches the obvious spam. It does not include Safe Links, Safe Attachments, anti-phishing impersonation rules, or the rest of what most people mean when they say “email security.” Those features live in Defender for Office 365 P1 (about $2 to $4 CAD per user per month), which is bundled in Business Premium and sold as an add-on if you stay on Standard or Basic.
Setup and migration. If you are new to Microsoft 365 or moving from Google Workspace, somebody has to do the actual work — tenant configuration, mailbox migration, SharePoint architecture, and training. Even a clean 10-user setup is typically a 20–40 hour project the first time around.
Training and adoption. The licence is the cheap part. The expensive part is your team using maybe 20% of what you paid for because nobody had the time to show them the rest. Plan for at least a few hours of training per role.
Ongoing support. Whether that is a part-time IT generalist on staff, a managed-services retainer, or a pay-as-you-go arrangement, this line item is real and rarely zero. Budget for it before you sign the year.
Walk down this list, top to bottom, and stop at the first match.
Then — and this is where most SMBs leave money on the table — mix licences across the team. Microsoft does not require that everyone in the same tenant be on the same plan, and your licensing partner can typically assign different plans to different users.
A realistic Canadian small business with two owners, five knowledge workers, and three frontline or field staff:
Total: $1,792.80 CAD per year.
Now compare that with the path of least resistance — putting everyone on Business Premium because it feels like the “safe” choice: 10 × $26.40 × 12 = $3,168.00 CAD per year. The mixed-licence approach saves roughly $1,375 a year, or about 43%, with no loss of functionality for anyone who genuinely needs Premium-tier features.
The savings get bigger as headcount grows. They also compound across the year, since the Defender for Office add-on you would otherwise tack onto Standard licences is already inside Premium for the two users who genuinely need it.
Microsoft sells most plans on either an annual or monthly commitment. Annual is roughly 17% cheaper but locks you in for the term. Monthly costs more per user but you can scale up or down whenever you like.
For a stable 10-person business with predictable headcount, take the annual commitment — it is the simplest material saving in the entire licensing conversation. Reserve monthly billing for short-term contractors or seats you genuinely expect to release inside the year.
If you are worried about being trapped, remember that an annual commitment locks the count of licences, not the assignment. You can move a Premium licence from a departing employee to a new hire mid-term without penalty. You only get hurt by an annual term if you are routinely shrinking total headcount inside a 12-month window.
Most of the savings in this post are recoverable on plans you already pay for. We will do a licence audit free of charge as part of a free assessment — same pay-as-you-go model as the rest of our Microsoft 365 service, so you only ever pay for what you actually use. If the answer is “you are already on the right plan,” that is the answer we will give you.
For users who handle sensitive data, manage laptops, or hold administrative roles, yes. The Intune device management and Defender for Business included in Premium typically pay for themselves the first time you need to remotely wipe a lost device or block an account-takeover attempt. For frontline or kiosk users, Standard or Basic is usually fine. Mixing licences across roles is allowed and is usually the cheapest right answer.
You can change which user is assigned which licence at any time inside the term. You can also upgrade a licence to a higher tier mid-term, with a prorated charge. You generally cannot reduce the number of licences below what you committed to at the start of the annual term — that is the part that is locked in.
A reasonable all-in starting budget for a mixed-licence 10-person team is roughly $2,000–$3,500 CAD per year for licences, plus $400–$700 per year for backup, plus a one-time $3,000–$8,000 setup or migration cost if you do not yet have a tenant. Ongoing support, training, and any add-on security tooling are separate.
You can buy direct from Microsoft. A partner is optional for licensing but useful for support, scoping, audits, and migration help — and a partner can often access promotional pricing or seat-level flexibility that is not surfaced on the public site. If “direct from Microsoft” means you will be self-serving every problem, factor in your own time at whatever your hourly cost is.
— Continue reading
Copilot is real, useful, and — at roughly $40 CAD/user/month on top of M365 — easy to overspend on. A practical look at where it earns its keep and where you should hold off.
How Microsoft 365 plans line up against the workflows of a typical Canadian SMB, what they cost in Canadian dollars, and the licence mistakes most small businesses make.
How a North American SaaS startup migrated from Trello, scattered Gmail, and a Dropbox-plus-Drive document jumble to a properly architected Microsoft 365 tenant — in six weeks, with no downtime, in time for a Series A diligence pass.
— Related services
Right-sized Microsoft 365 plans, set up properly and supported pay-as-you-go. Built for Canadian small businesses that want productivity tools without surprises on the next licensing bill.
On-prem to Azure, Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, file shares to SharePoint. Planned moves with no surprises at cutover — and no scope creep on the invoice.
Pay-as-you-go IT support for Canadian small businesses. A small monthly minimum, billable hours when you need us, and someone who actually picks up the phone.
