"Office 365 Extra File Storage" pricing is criminal

Question

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.

Answer 1

@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".

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

I agree with you Ash, for Sharepoint we need NCE licenses from 1TB to 5TB at a price identical to OneDrive, and allow companies that use this system to stay on this system and not engage in complications and combinations of several solutions which require more complex skills.