tl;dr -- Do the new Microsoft (No Teams) licensing changes essentially make it far less worthwhile to try to get clients to switch Office 365 providers? Isn't this just another middle finger to CSPs?

Hey MSP community,

I just learned (about a month late) about the new changes to Microsoft's Office 365 Lineup to no longer bundle Teams with any of the Office 365 Enterprise plans.

My question is this.. Say we have a customer that has a bunch of E3 licenses with another provider, and we convince them to switch to us. Wouldn't it be the case that we'd have to provision them net new licensing and charge them the new licensing scheme?

From my calculations, if we are looking at retail pricing, the new pricing is $33.75/mo (E3) + $5.25/mo (Teams Enterprise) = $39 whereas the old E3 pricing was $36.00

Since the incumbent provider is able to continue to keep them on old E3 licensing pricing, their pricing advantage would be about 8.33% for all existing licensing requiring us to cut our margin (or go negative, depending on what that margin might be)

Am I misreading this situation? Would the customer be considered then Net New if they swap providers?

Sources:

Wayback Machine Teams Pricing on Jan 1st:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240107213218/https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/microsoft365-plans-and-pricing

Current Teams Pricing:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/microsoft365-plans-and-pricing

MS Weasel Words?:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/news/microsoft365-teams-ww

I want to use a custom domain name for my business email and I'm looking for the most cost effective plan.

It seems like for $0.75 more a month, the Business Basic plan gives so much more. Unless I'm misunderstanding some parts of the offerings, is there any reason I should go with Exchange Online (Plan 1)?

I have the desktop apps for Microsoft Office Home & Student 2021 if that makes a difference.