Microsoft Teams pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives
Microsoft Teams (teams.microsoft.com) is a team chat app. A free version for anyone, plus per-user plans: Teams Essentials as a standalone product at $4.00 per user per month billed yearly, and Microsoft 365 bundles that include Teams.. Free plan: Free version for anyone, incl. small business: unlimited chat, 5 GB cloud storage per user, group meetings up to 60 minutes, up to 100 participants..
What Microsoft Teams costs
- 10 users: free (Free version counted as covered: no member cap published, chat is unlimited, and storage is 5 GB per user (5 x 10 = 50 GB, above 10 GB). If it does not qualify, Teams Essentials gives 10 x $4.00 = $40.)
- 50 users: free (Free version counted as covered: no member cap published, and 5 GB per user (5 x 50 = 250 GB, above 50 GB). If a member cap below 50 applies, Teams Essentials gives 50 x $4.00 = $200.)
- 25 users + SSO: $100/mo (Free version has no SSO. Cheapest SSO option is Teams Essentials, sold only on an annual plan at $4.00 per user per month (annual price / 12 = $4.00): 25 x $4.00 = $100. Assumes Entra ID federation with a third-party SAML provider is available on Essentials.)
Plan compared: Teams free version, which covers 10 members (no member cap published). Prices are total USD per month on monthly billing (annual-only plans divided by 12) for the cheapest plan that runs a team's chat with full, unlimited searchable message history: 10 or 50 members, and 25 members signing in through SAML single sign-on. A free plan counts as $0 only when it covers the team with no message-history, member or storage cap it would hit.
What Microsoft Teams does
Core: Built-in team chat, Built-in video meetings, Office suite bundle.
Important: Threaded conversations, Searchable message history, Guests and shared channels, App integrations ecosystem, Bots and workflow automation, AI summaries and answers, Built-in docs and tasks, Desktop and mobile apps (partly), SSO and user provisioning (partly), Retention and compliance controls.
Also has: Screen & camera recording, End-to-end encryption (partly).
Microsoft Teams price hikes
No price hikes on record for Microsoft Teams.
Alternatives to Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is the cheapest team chat app we track at a 10-person team. The others:
Microsoft Teams alternatives: 2 team chat apps compared, at every size.
Sources
Pricing page: microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/compare-microsoft-teams-business-options. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. The free version is treated as qualifying because no member cap is published, storage is 5 GB per user, and chat is unlimited, so the team10 and team50 zeros are inferred. No sourced price changes were found: the PricingSaaS page returned no Teams entries and a search found none.