Microsoft Is Shutting Down Office 365 A1: Universities Have Until January 1, 2028

⚡ The gist in 5 seconds

• Microsoft is winding down Office 365 A1, the Student Use Benefit, and free Exchange Online for Alumni.
• Direct web sales of A1 closed on November 5; partner channels (CSP, Volume Licensing) will stop on May 1, 2027.
• After January 1, 2028, licenses cannot be renewed or expanded.

🔍 What happened

Microsoft has sent educational institutions a plan for phasing out its free education plans. Three things are getting cut: Office 365 A1, the Student Use Benefit program with discounted licenses for students, and free Exchange Online for Alumni — email for graduates. Starting January 1, 2028, Open Value Subscription for Education Solutions (OVS-ES) and School 3 are also being discontinued.

Here's the timeline. Direct web sales of A1 stopped on November 5. From May 1, 2027, partners will stop selling the plan — via the Cloud Solution Provider program and through corporate licensing (Volume Licensing). January 1, 2028 is the final cutoff: no renewals, no expansions.

Those who signed up before May 1, 2027 can keep working until the end of their current contract. After that — the only option is moving to a paid plan. Same story with the Student Use Benefit: licenses last until the end of the subscription, with no renewals.

A separate blow is storage. Microsoft is taking away the base 100 TB shared pool at the first renewal, which will come on January 1, 2028 or later. After that, storage is counted per license: students get +4 GB on A2, +8 GB on A3, +12 GB on A5/A7. Faculty get 50, 75, and 150 GB. The free A0 tier adds nothing at all: students eat into the institution's shared pool. The options are buying 10 TB add-on packs, cleaning out archives, or moving to Microsoft 365 Archive.

In its place, Microsoft is drawing up a new lineup: A0, A2, A3, A5, A7. Separate tiers for students and faculty, with and without Teams. A0 is free for those who meet the criteria: classic and web versions of Office, Minecraft.

🧠 Our take

This isn't a one-off move — it's a pattern. Microsoft already scrapped unlimited OneDrive storage for Office 365 subscribers, then raised the caps to 5 TB and 10 TB. Now the same logic has reached education. A1 was handed out for years — first as bait into the ecosystem, later as a burden. Our assessment: the timing was chosen so universities can factor the new costs into their 2027/2028 academic year budgets.

What does this change the most? Not email — storage. A hundred terabytes per university quietly held lecture archives, term papers, lab backups — and nobody ever looked at them. Now they'll have to. A school with a thousand students on A1 turns into a customer with a price list. In our experience, administrators in these situations cut the old stuff first rather than buy — and that's a bad sign for data preservation. Storage in 10 TB packs is also questionable: not every university will buy exactly as much as it needs.

Who wins is clear. Microsoft and CSP partners, who get paying customers with a clear transition deadline. The losers are small educational institutions without their own IT departments, and alumni whose free email will become paid. We believe the free A0 tier is less a gift than bait: it has no storage, and without storage the tier is useless as a primary plan.

⚠️ What we don't know

The announcement contains no prices for A2, A3, A5, and A7 — and it's precisely these that will determine how painful the transition is. The source doesn't specify the year in the "November 5" date. The criteria for a student to qualify for A0 are also not disclosed. Plus, this is a retelling from Habr, not the original Microsoft document — the wording should be verified against the vendor's letter before planning budgets.

Prediction: by mid-2027, Microsoft will publish pricing for the education A2–A7 tiers and add at least one paid storage option to A0 — otherwise universities will defect to competitors before the deadline.

Source: Habr