"Office 365 Extra File Storage" pricing is criminal

Ash Prince 20 Reputation points
2023-01-15T17:55:07.43+00:00

Maybe I'm missing something. My wife's small business is running out of storage on her company's sharepoint. She has purchased 16 Microsoft 365 Business Standard licenses and only gets 1 TB of sharepoint storage.

Looking at this link from Microsoft, it appears she needs to purchase the "Office 365 Extra File Storage" add-on. Microsoft wants to charge $0.25 per gigabyte per month. This is ludicrously expensive and borderline predatory. That's $250 for an additional terabyte. PER MONTH.

There must be another option to increasing sharepoint storage, right? That's more than she pays for all other licenses and services combined.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Install, redeem, activate | For business | Windows
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4 answers

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  1. Joost van der Linden 126 Reputation points
    2023-08-09T07:08:52.8266667+00:00

    @Ash Prince a couple of weeks ago a representative of Microsoft told me that there is an alternative route.

    You could purchase five licenses of OneDrive for Business (Plan 2). This way, you could setup an archive user account in Microsoft 365 and assign the OneDrive for Business (Plan 2) license to it. It allows you to upgrade the storage limit for this account to 5 TB. At 90% you can submit a service request with Microsoft to raise the limit to 25 TB.

    Downside of this is that you need to move the data to the OneDrive account. But it's still SharePoint under the hood. I'd use it for static data, and leave the active data in SharePoint/Teams.

    Five times OneDrive for Business (Plan 2) is still a lot cheaper than 1 TB of licenses of "Office 365 Extra File Storage".

    5 people found this answer helpful.

  2. Hugo NALLET 10 Reputation points
    2023-01-16T12:41:11.5433333+00:00

    Hi Ash,

    Unfortunately, you don't have the choice. This page explain well how these licences works : [https://lazyadmin.nl/office-365/sharepoint-storage-limits/

    My advice is to check the Sharepoint Storage Metrics.

    In a first step in the SharePoint Admin Center :

    1. Open the SharePoint Admin Center
    2. Select Sites > Active Sites
    3. Sort the sites on the Storage used (GB) column

    Second step in the Storage Metrics of the sharepoint site :

    1. Open the site self
    2. Select Site Content
    3. Select Settings Settings
    4. Choose Storage Metrics

    So, As you said, if you get a warning that your SharePoint storage is almost full, then you have two options. Buy additional storage space, which will cost $0.20 per GB per month or cleanup your SharePoint sites.

    My last advice is to check if there is no "personnal" files on the SharePoint. Indeed, each user have 1To of Onedrive, so they can maybe store "working files" and "personnal" on their own OneDrive, and keep definitve files on SharePoint to optimize the storage.

    I hope you will find a solution, the least worse as you understand.

    2 people found this answer helpful.

  3. TrevorL 56 Reputation points
    2024-05-14T14:47:32.8033333+00:00

    I appreciate this is an old post but you should look at the versions used for each file, by default MS sets a 500 version limit for EACH file. you can change this in the SP site settings down to 50 BUT this won't clear existing versions. We created a Powershell script to clear all versions of a file that had not been edited for 6 months. We have also developed a script to move large files from SP to a storage account just leaving a place holder in SP, these two scripts have saved us large quantities of SP space.

    also check out MS's archiving options, not used myself but may be of use https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365-archive/

    Unfortunately these scripts are not in a state to be published yet

    2 people found this answer helpful.

  4. Marco Dalic 0 Reputation points
    2025-06-27T13:38:06.3933333+00:00

    Because we found the pricing aswell really expensive, we have developed a tool called "ShArc" that

    1. identifies cold data in SharePoint,
    2. moves it into your Azure Blob Storage (Cool), saving you more than 50% in comparison to the expensive Office 365 Extra File Storage.
    3. End-users can still interact with the offloade files in SharePoint

    Here´s the link: https://www.layer2-sharc.com/


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