Microsoft Licensing Changes, November 2026

What changed in software licensing in November 2026? Microsoft and Salesforce are both implementing a meter for AI agent work this quarter. The first three-year VMware agreements signed after the Broadcom acquisition are now up for renewal. Oracle cut Java prices for organizations with fewer than 3,000 employees. Five Microsoft dates land between November 10 and February 1.

On December 1, Microsoft Turns On the Meter for Copilot. The Default Limit Is $40 Per User Per Month.

Last month we said we would answer the question clients keep asking: what do you actually owe once AI agents start doing the work? For Microsoft, the answer arrives on December 1.

Starting that day, Microsoft switches on usage-based billing by default for new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licences bought through the Cloud Solution Provider channel. This covers standalone licences and bundles such as Business Premium with Copilot, new subscriptions, seats added to an existing subscription, and upgrades. Microsoft originally planned this for November 2, and pushed it back a month.

Microsoft is splitting Copilot into two parts. Everyday AI, such as meeting summaries, document drafting, and analysis in Word, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, falls under the per-user licence. Microsoft bills advanced work, including Copilot Cowork, Work IQ APIs and GitHub Copilot Harness, in Copilot Credits at one cent each.

The default spending limit is 4,000 credits per user per month, which works out to up to $40 per user on top of the licence. For 100 users, the ceiling is $4,000 a month, or $48,000 a year. Microsoft charges only for actual usage, so the limit is a ceiling rather than a bill. Admins can lower it or set it to zero, but the time to do that is before the first purchase, not after the first invoice. At launch, the default does not apply in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, Korea, the Netherlands, Poland or Spain. The default does apply in Canada and the United States.

Copilot No Longer Needs a Base Licence

The same day brings a change in purchasing. From December 1, customers can buy Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Business without a qualifying Microsoft 365 base licence, across all channels and at the same price. Microsoft renamed the existing offers “(add-on)” on October 16, and they reach end of sale in CSP on December 1. End of sale is not end of life: existing customers can keep renewing and adjusting seat counts, and nobody needs to migrate. Microsoft is clear that Copilot still depends on the apps a user holds licences for, so a Copilot licence on a user without Word, Outlook or Teams buys a much smaller product.

The Real Question Is Who Owns the Limit

The licence price is now the smaller part of the Copilot budgeting question. The bigger part is who sets the limit, at what level, and who reviews consumption each month. Finance leaders are already seeing why. Trintech’s CFO, Omar Choucair, told The Daily Upside his company set up weekly usage reviews and hard spending limits after finding that “one heavy user can consume more tokens than a hundred colleagues.”

One housekeeping change from Microsoft’s November 1 Product Terms is worth checking at renewal. Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service no longer appear as standalone products. Microsoft has included their role features in Microsoft 365 Copilot at no extra charge since October 2025. If a renewal quote still shows a separate Sales or Service line, ask why.

Setting Copilot limits before December 1? Microsoft AI Cost Control helps you size them against how your people actually use Copilot.

Salesforce Will Charge for Every Call Your Agents Make. The Price Is Still “TBA.”

Salesforce is moving in the same direction from a different starting point. In a document published September 17, 2026, it set a November target for metering agent traffic under its Headless Toolkit.

The mechanism is simple. Every successful call a registered agent makes to Salesforce, through Model Context Protocol or a direct API, counts as one Headless Platform Interaction and draws down Flex Credits from the customer’s Digital Wallet. Flex Credits list at $500 per 100,000. Ordinary, non-agentic integration pricing does not change, and Salesforce does not meter sandboxes, scratch orgs or Developer Edition orgs.

Salesforce has not yet published the multiplier that converts each interaction into credits. It says it will give 30 days’ notice before it adds a multiplier and starts metering, so the earliest bill is at least a month away from any announcement.

Registration Deadlines Are Already Running

The registration rules are already in force. Customers who bought on or after September 17 must register every agent that uses Salesforce APIs within three months of Salesforce’s notice that Agentic Identity is available. Existing customers running agents on APIs register and migrate at renewal. Any use of a Salesforce MCP server requires registration within the same three-month window, for all customers.

This lands on top of the editions Salesforce launched on September 3. Core, Advanced, and Max cost $195, $395, and $550 per user per month and include pools of 500,000, 1 million, and 2.75 million Flex Credits. Salesforce has not said whether those pools apply per organization or per user. That matters a great deal when an agent’s every call draws from the same wallet.

If your 2027 Salesforce budget has no separate line for agent usage, it is missing one. The renewal is also the time to ask how pooled credits work, what happens at the limit, and whether you can write a multiplier cap into the order form.

Agent billing is spreading beyond Salesforce. Our Multi-Vendor AI Billing Exposure guide shows where it is likely to show up across your vendors.

Three Years After Broadcom Closed the VMware Deal, the First Renewals Are Landing.

Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023 and moved customers from perpetual licences to per-core subscription bundles. Many organizations signed three-year agreements soon after, and those agreements are now coming up for renewal. For many customers, this is the first time they have seen the new pricing on their own estate.

The cloud route has narrowed too. Azure VMware Solution no longer includes VMware licences for new deployments, and licence-included pay-as-you-go deployments had to move to portable VMware Cloud Foundation licences by October 31, 2026. Customers on licence-included reserved instances must buy portable VCF licences and move to a bring-your-own-licence SKU, or exit, by August 30, 2027. Microsoft attributed the change to Broadcom’s VCF licensing changes.

Three Numbers That Set the Renewal Price

Renewal is the one moment when the edition, the core count and the term are all open. Three numbers do most of the work:

• The minimums. VMware bills per physical core, with a minimum of 16 cores per CPU. A server with two 8-core processors still pays for 32 cores.
• The edition. One reseller’s review of 37 VMware renewals this year found VMware Cloud Foundation quoted at roughly 1.8 to 2.9 times the per-core rate of vSphere Foundation on like-for-like one-year terms. That is around $344 per core per year, compared with $117 to $196. Estates that run vSphere and vCenter and little else are often paying for the bigger bundle, and a downgrade is only available at renewal.
• The term. Three- and five-year quotes came in at a lower annual rate than one-year quotes, but they lock the core count and edition for the term. For an estate that is shrinking or still deciding its future, the one-year premium buys the right to decide later.

Check Who Can Still Quote You

Two practical points: start 60 to 90 days before expiry, as quotes are often valid for about 30 days, and late renewals incur fees. And confirm who can quote you. In the same review, one request in four came from an account Broadcom manages directly, which no partner can quote. In October, Broadcom also confirmed it had removed Insight Enterprises, one of its largest partners, from reselling VMware in North America. The partner who quoted your last renewal may not be able to quote this one. The service-provider side is shrinking too. CISPE, the European cloud trade body, says fewer than 20 European providers remain authorized to offer VMware-based services, down from more than a thousand. RapidScale’s CEO expects the US market to narrow to roughly 10 to 16 large providers.

Keep one more date in view: vSphere 8 reaches end of general support on October 11, 2027. If you are renewing now on a one-year term, that date falls inside your next renewal window.

If you are weighing a move, check your migration tooling as well. In September, Broadcom confirmed it had removed public access to VDDK, a VMware library many migration tools rely on, and limited it to backup and recovery use by approved partners.

VMware renewal on the calendar? Our Contract Renewal & Negotiation team can review the quote before you sign.

Oracle Cut Java Prices by Up to 94% for Smaller Organizations. Enterprises Got Nothing.

On October 8, Oracle published new pricing for the Java SE Universal Subscription for organizations with fewer than 3,000 employees. The old model charged per employee across the whole organization, which made Java one of the most expensive surprises in a mid-market audit.

List prices in USD, before negotiated discounts. Between 501 and 2,999 employees, the price is $10,000 plus $147.20 for each employee above 500.

Pricing for organizations with 3,000 or more employees is unchanged.

Three Conditions That Are Easy to Miss

• Direct only. Oracle sells the new bands directly, not through resellers. Organizations with 500 or fewer employees can buy online.
• Processor caps. The old subscription covered up to 50,000 processors regardless of company size. The new bands cap processors by employee count, at 1,000, 10,000 and 20,000 for the three lower tiers, excluding desktops and laptops. A small company with a large server estate may save less than the table suggests.
• Employee definition. Oracle counts employees by its contractual definition, which includes relevant contractors and outsourced staff. That number is often higher than headcount on the HR report.

If you signed a Java subscription in the last two years, or are in a compliance conversation with Oracle, review your position before your next renewal. A lower price does not settle the underlying question of where Java runs in your estate and which installations you actually need to license.

Not sure where Java runs in your estate? Start with our Oracle licence optimization service.

Your Microsoft Year-End Calendar: Five Dates Before February 1.

November 10: Windows 11 23H2 end of servicing. Windows 11 Enterprise and Education version 23H2 stop receiving security updates. Devices still on 23H2 need to move to a supported version.

December 1: Copilot usage-based billing becomes the default for new Copilot Business licences in CSP, and customers can buy Copilot without a base licence. Details above.

December 31: Promotions expire. The Copilot Business offers end: 15% off standalone and 25% off the Microsoft 365 Business Basic plus Copilot Business bundle, both for 1 to 300 seats on annual terms. The Microsoft 365 E3 promotions we covered in October also expire: 20% off a one-year term at 250 or more seats for targeted customers, and 10% off a three-year term at 100 or more seats. A promotional price lasts only for the term you bought it on, so a subscription renews at list price.

January and February

January 1: Microsoft Power Apps price increase and currency update. Power Apps Premium rises from $20 to $22 per user per month, and from $12 to $14 per user per month at 2,000 or more seats. That applies to new purchases, renewals and co-terminations starting on or after January 1. From February, Power Apps will also start blocking users who lack a licence they always needed, including users in managed environments and users of model-driven apps. Microsoft’s annual local-currency price update takes effect the same day, with guidance due this month.

February 1: Azure regional price rises. Microsoft notified customers on October 2 that prices for specific VM series and storage services will rise in seven regions: North Europe (Dublin) by 17%, France Central and France South by 11%, West Europe (Amsterdam), Norway East and Norway West by 9%, and Southeast Asia (Singapore) by 8%. None are Canadian or US regions, but many multinational estates run workloads in Dublin and Amsterdam. Separately, partners report that selected older v1 and v2 VM series will rise by roughly 25% on the same date. If you still run them, check your own Azure Service Health notices. Reservations bought before February 1 hold today’s rate for their term. Savings plans do not lock the rate. As of that date, you can no longer exchange new reservations for services covered by savings plans.

One Offer Runs Into 2027

One promotion runs past year-end. From October 27, 2026 through June 30, 2027, eligible customers who purchase at least 300 new Microsoft 365 E3 licences via CSP can get 30% off for one year. Eligibility is narrow: Microsoft targets it to select accounts, and Office 365 seats renewed in 2026 are ineligible. At $39 list, 300 seats is $140,400 a year, so the discount is worth about $42,120 in year one. After twelve months, it renews at standard pricing, so negotiate the year-two price before you sign.

Frequently Asked Questions

When does Microsoft turn on usage-based billing for Copilot Business?

December 1, 2026. From that date, new Microsoft 365 Copilot Business licences bought through the Cloud Solution Provider channel have usage-based billing enabled by default, with a spending limit of 4,000 Copilot Credits per user per month. Microsoft originally planned the change for November 2, 2026.

How much can Copilot usage-based billing cost per user?

Copilot Credits cost 1 cent each, so the default limit of 4,000 credits amounts to up to $40 per user per month on top of the licence. Microsoft charges only for actual usage, and admins can lower the limit or set it to zero.

Can I buy Microsoft 365 Copilot without a Microsoft 365 licence?

From December 1, 2026, yes. Customers can buy the new Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Business offers without a qualifying base subscription, across all channels and at the same price. Copilot features still depend on the Microsoft 365 apps and services for which each user holds licences.

Is Salesforce charging for AI agent API calls?

Salesforce has announced it will meter every successful call a registered agent makes to its platform as a Headless Platform Interaction, drawn from Flex Credits, with a target of November 2026. Salesforce has not published the multiplier yet, and says it will give 30 days’ notice before metering starts.

What is the new Oracle Java price for small and mid-sized organizations?

Since October 8, 2026, Oracle’s Java SE Universal Subscription costs $100 per year for up to 10 employees, $1,000 per year for up to 100 employees, and $10,000 per year for up to 500 employees. Between 501 and 2,999 employees, the price is $10,000 plus $147.20 per employee above 500. Pricing for 3,000 or more employees is unchanged.

Planning a Microsoft EA renewal? Start with our Microsoft EA Renewal Guide.

Sources

• Partner Center announcements, October 2026, Microsoft Learn. Copilot offers and name updates (October 14); usage-based billing default for Copilot Business from December 1 (October 1, updated October 14); Microsoft 365 E3 30% promotion; Copilot Business promotions through December 31.
• Azure VMware Solution license-included service retirement, Microsoft Learn. Licence-included retirement dates.
• New Lower SMB Pricing and Easier Online Purchasing of Java SE Universal Subscription, Oracle Java blog, October 8, 2026.
• Microsoft Licensing Update November 2026, LicenseQ, November 2, 2026. Azure regional price increases (Azure Service Health advisory JGW1-KG0, October 2, 2026), Power Apps pricing and enforcement, and November 1 Product Terms changes.
• The Meter Arrives in November: Salesforce Will Charge for Every Call Your Agents Make, Forkast, October 25, 2026. Salesforce Headless Toolkit metering, from Salesforce’s September 17, 2026 document.
• VMware Renewal Pricing in 2026: What 37 Quotes Show, AceMQ. Renewals reviewed between September 2025 and September 2026.
• Broadcom channel exec says Insight deauthorized in North America, CRN, October 2026.
• Broadcom denied names of cloud providers backing VMware merger challenge, The Register, November 3, 2026. CISPE provider figures.
• VMware Partner Shakeup Changes How Providers Compete, Channel Insider, November 2, 2026.
• Broadcom confirms it revoked public VMware migration tool access, TechTarget, September 9, 2026.
• VMware licensing in 2026, StackScale. vSphere 8 end of general support.
• Oracle Java pricing: cost and security, SoftwareOne, October 19, 2026. Java price comparison, based on Oracle’s published price lists.
• How CFOs Can Handle Employees’ Expensive Taste in AI, The Daily Upside, November 3, 2026.