Microsoft 365 Business Basic vs Standard vs Premium: NZ$ prices, and where Copilot fits

Microsoft 365 pricing in NZ: Business Basic is NZ$10.44, Business Standard NZ$21.00 and Business Premium NZ$33.30 per user per month, paid yearly. I am Balu at Kove (kove.nz), and a small NZ firm needs Business Standard for most staff (NZ$21.00 per user per month, paid yearly) and Business Premium (NZ$33.30) for anyone whose laptop or phone holds client data. Business Basic (NZ$10.44) only suits people who live in the web apps. Copilot Business is a separate add-on on top of any of them: NZ$34.00 per user per month, and a person on Premium with Copilot is NZ$67.30. Premium buys real security and none of the Power Platform features most owners think it buys. Not sure which plan fits your staff? Try the Microsoft licence decoder, or book the free call at the bottom.

One licence question this post does not cover: whether Power Apps pay-as-you-go beats the per-user licence for a single app. It usually does, worked in Power Apps pay-as-you-go in NZ.

What a professional services firm actually builds on those licences, by sector: accounting practices, law firms, engineering consultancies.

Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard and Premium price in NZ

These are Microsoft's NZ list prices per user per month on an annual plan, read from microsoft.com/en-nz on 19 September 2026.

Plan	NZ$ per user per month (paid yearly)	Who it suits
Microsoft 365 Business Basic	NZ$10.44	People who only use the web and mobile apps
Microsoft 365 Business Standard	NZ$21.00	Most staff, with desktop Office apps installed
Microsoft 365 Business Premium	NZ$33.30	Anyone whose laptop or phone holds client data

Business Basic, Standard and Premium: what changes

Business Basic is the cheapest tier and it shows: web and mobile versions of Word, Excel and Outlook, hosted email, SharePoint and OneDrive storage, and Teams. No desktop app installs. Fine for a handful of people who only ever check email and fill in a form, wrong for anyone drafting documents or building spreadsheets all day.

Business Standard adds the desktop apps people expect: Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint installed on the machine, plus Clipchamp and a few extras. For most professional services staff, this is the baseline, not Basic.

Business Premium keeps everything in Standard and adds a layer of security and device management: Microsoft Intune for managing and remotely wiping laptops and phones, Microsoft Defender for Business for endpoint protection, Microsoft Entra ID P1 for Conditional Access, and rights to upgrade to Windows Enterprise. Nothing here touches the Office apps themselves. Premium is a security tier under the same product name.

Microsoft's NZ list prices on an annual plan, read from microsoft.com/en-nz on 19 September 2026, are NZ$10.44 per user per month for Business Basic, NZ$21.00 for Business Standard and NZ$33.30 for Business Premium. Microsoft changes these, and NZ buyers often transact through a CSP partner rather than at list, so check the figure before you budget. The shape of the gap is the useful part: Premium is about NZ$12.30 a user a month over Standard, and Standard is about double Basic.

One limit worth knowing before you scale: the 300-seat cap on Business plans applies across the whole family, not per tier. A firm running 250 people on Premium has 50 seats left across Basic, Standard and Premium combined before Microsoft pushes it onto an Enterprise plan like E3. Twenty people is nowhere near that line, but it's worth knowing before you assume Business plans scale forever.

Business Basic	Business Standard	Business Premium
Web and mobile Office apps only	Desktop Office apps installed	Same apps as Standard
Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams	Same, plus Clipchamp	Same as Standard
No device management	No device management	Intune device management
Basic malware protection	Basic malware protection	Defender for Business
No Conditional Access	No Conditional Access	Entra ID P1, full Conditional Access
Same seeded Power Apps and Power Automate rights on every tier: standard connectors only, no Dataverse, no premium connectors

The security features in Premium that matter at twenty staff

Entra ID P1 is the one that earns its keep. It gives you Conditional Access, the policy engine that can say a login only counts if it comes from a managed device, or forces MFA the moment someone signs in from outside New Zealand, or blocks legacy authentication that phishing kits rely on. At twenty staff, that is the difference between a stolen password being a dead end and being a way into your client files.

Intune matters for the same reason as Conditional Access but for hardware: if a laptop goes missing from a car or a cafe, you can wipe it remotely and enforce disk encryption on every device before that question ever comes up. Defender for Business gives every machine the endpoint protection a much larger IT department would run, bundled into the per-seat price instead of bought separately.

What Premium doesn't include is Entra ID P2, the tier with risk-based sign-in detection and identity governance workflows. That's aimed at larger organisations with a security team watching dashboards. At twenty staff, skip it without a second thought.

Run the cost the way an owner should: the gap between Standard and Premium is about NZ$12.30 per user per month on Microsoft's NZ list prices. Weigh that against what one lost laptop with client financial records on it costs you in notification, remediation and the conversation with that client. For most professional services firms holding any real client data, Premium wins that comparison easily.

Where Power Platform sits, and what your licence already includes

This is the part that catches almost everyone out (the worked NZD cost is in the Power Apps premium licence trap). A firm on Business Premium assumes "Premium" means they've got the good version of Power Apps and Power Automate too. It doesn't. Basic, Standard and Premium all carry the exact same seeded Power Platform rights: build canvas apps and flows against Microsoft 365 data, SharePoint lists, Outlook, Excel, using standard connectors only. No premium connectors, and no full Dataverse: what the seeded rights do carry is Dataverse for Teams, a free tier with hard walls of its own. That seeded tier doesn't change no matter which Business plan sits underneath it.

"Premium" in Power Platform is a completely different product line, sold on its own regardless of your Microsoft 365 tier. Power Apps premium access runs roughly USD 20 per user per month, Power Automate Premium around USD 15 per user per month, and both are licensed per person who uses the app or flow rather than per builder. A firm on Business Premium building a Power App that connects to SQL, or a flow that calls an outside API through the HTTP connector, still needs to buy that premium Power Platform licence for every person who touches it. Moving from Standard to Premium on the Microsoft 365 side buys none of that.

This is where a build gets expensive after it's already live. A flow that tests fine against SharePoint suddenly needs a paid licence for everyone once someone adds one connector Microsoft classes as premium. I've written the specific list of what counts as premium and how to check before you build, in the piece on premium connectors and the invoice nobody budgets for. Read that before scoping anything that leaves SharePoint.

Most twenty-person professional services firms never need to leave the seeded tier. Internal approval flows, a client intake form backed by a SharePoint list, a document tracker, a simple dashboard built off Excel or SharePoint data: all of that runs on the licence you already pay for. I go through the SharePoint-versus-Dataverse decision and the rest of the Power Platform picture on the Power Platform services page, but the short rule is: don't buy premium Power Platform licensing speculatively. Buy it when a specific build genuinely needs it, and only for the people who'll use that build. Once a few of those licensed builds exist, the harder question stops being what to buy and starts being who still owns each one, which is the governance problem I go through separately in Power Platform governance for a small business.

Add-ons that are usually a waste at this size

• Teams Phone. Only worth it if you're actually replacing a phone system. Bolting it on because it's there adds a monthly line item most firms never use.
• The Viva suite. Employee engagement dashboards and management insights built for organisations with an HR function tracking that data. At twenty people, you already know how your team's doing.
• E5-level compliance add-ons. eDiscovery Premium, Insider Risk Management, advanced audit. Built for regulated industries with a compliance officer running them. Skip unless a specific regulatory requirement says otherwise.
• Copilot seats for everyone on day one. Buy three to five seats for the people drafting the most documents and emails, see whether it gets used daily, then decide whether it's worth rolling wider. Buying twenty seats up front to find out is an expensive way to run that experiment, and the seat-by-seat test for who clears the bar is in is Copilot worth it for a small NZ firm.
• Power BI Pro for the whole firm. Usually two or three people build and read reports. Licence those people rather than everyone who might glance at a dashboard once a quarter, and the full viewer-licence trap is worked through in Power BI vs Excel.

A recommended baseline for a NZ professional services firm

If client data sits on staff laptops or phones, which covers most professional services firms holding financial, legal or health information, Business Premium across the board is the sensible default. The premium over Standard is small next to what a lost device or a phished account costs, and Conditional Access alone justifies it. If your firm is a rare case where no sensitive client data ever touches a device, Standard is a defensible call, but check that assumption carefully before you rely on it.

Leave Power Platform premium licensing off the shopping list entirely until a specific app or flow needs it. Then buy it narrowly, for the people who'll run that one build. The bill then scales with what you use instead of with your headcount.

And check pricing against a CSP partner before you commit either way. NZ buyers rarely pay Microsoft's list price directly, and a decent partner bundles support into a rate that can beat list even before any volume discount kicks in.

For a law firm, the Microsoft 365 line is usually the smaller of the two software bills next to the practice management system itself; Smokeball's pricing in NZ is a case where that second bill has no published New Zealand figure at all.

Outside clients logging in to a system are not covered by any of these plans: what covers them.

Before adding Copilot to any plan, check what it would surface: what Copilot can see in your files.

Business Premium with Copilot: what it costs and where it fits

Microsoft 365 Copilot Business is an add-on, not a plan. It needs a qualifying Microsoft 365 Business subscription underneath, is capped at 300 users per organisation, and Microsoft's NZ list price is NZ$34.00 per user per month on an annual plan, with a promotional NZ$29.14 through 31 December 2026 (microsoft.com/en-nz, read 1 October 2026). So Business Premium plus Copilot Business is NZ$67.30 per user per month at the regular price, against NZ$33.30 for Premium alone.

I would not put it on every seat. Start with the three to five people who draft the most, and test it first on your own files: is Copilot worth it for a small NZ firm has the seat-by-seat test and what Copilot can see in your files covers the permissions clean-up to do first. If you want the whole decision, tool choice and staff rules included, that is the AI work on the services page.

Licensing questions I get asked most

A mortgage or insurance broker asking what their licence already covers for tracking client applications will find the answer in this post.