While Microsoft Teams is free, or rather bundled, for Office 365 Business Premium and Enterprise customers, there’s no way for smaller businesses or individuals collaborating with larger businesses to access the company’s collaboration tools for free. But that might be changing. Some observant folks have spotted pointers to a new freemium option.
While Microsoft boasts over 125,000 companies have taken up Microsoft Teams – which is pretty good considering it’s not yet had its first birthday – it hasn’t gained traction with small businesses and start-ups. In that space, free options like Slack, which works closely with the cheaper-than-O365 G-Suite, is a far more cost effective option.
In response, it looks like Microsoft is getting ready to offer a no-cost entry point to using Teams.
There are references that were found and reported by Petri strongly suggesting that a free version, with the usual incentives to upgrade to a paid version, is under development.
This makes a lot of sense. Microsoft is doing well at leveraging their corporate strength to get Teams into large companies. But tomorrow’s large companies are today’s start ups and becoming embedded in those businesses and being part of their initial growth is a path to a much longer revenue stream for the software giant.
Perhaps that’s what we’ll see when Teams celebrates its first birthday on 14 March 2018.
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