Every user on an Otterly plan picks one of four Microsoft 365 tiers. The prices below are our current per-user monthly rates, excluding GST, and they update automatically if our menu changes. You can mix tiers freely across a team, and in a typical 20 to 200 person business, mixing is exactly what you should do.
One thing that's the same on every tier: support is included in the price. Mail and mailbox issues, shared mailboxes and distribution lists, password resets, new starters and secure offboarding, Office app troubleshooting for the apps your tier includes, deleted file and email recovery, spam and phishing investigation, and quick "how do I" questions are all part of the per-user rate, not billed by the hour. Project work, like migrations or new systems, is scoped separately.
Email only ($18/user/mo) Business-class Exchange email, calendar and contacts.
Email + web apps ($28/user/mo) Email plus Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the browser, with OneDrive and Teams.
Email + desktop apps ($42/user/mo) Email plus the full Office apps installed on your PCs and Macs.
Business Premium ($65/user/mo) The whole raft: desktop apps plus advanced security, device management and Intune.
Email only ($18/user/mo)
Business-class Exchange email with a 50 GB mailbox, shared calendars and contacts. No Office apps are included at this tier.
Who it suits: people who live in their inbox and nowhere else. Warehouse and field staff, casual employees, shared mailboxes like accounts@ or reception@, and anyone whose whole job in the Microsoft world is reading and replying.
Who it doesn't: anyone who opens a spreadsheet more than once a fortnight. If they're editing documents, the next tier up costs less than the workarounds.
Email + web apps ($28/user/mo)
Everything above, plus Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook in the browser, 1 TB of OneDrive storage, Teams, and SharePoint. The apps run in a browser tab rather than being installed on the computer.
Who it suits: most day-to-day office work, honestly. If your people write documents, work in shared spreadsheets and join Teams calls, the web apps handle it, and files stay in the cloud where they're shareable and backed up. This is our default recommendation and the tier we start most quotes with.
Who it doesn't: heavy Excel users. The web version of Excel is good, but macros, Power Query, complex models and giant workbooks want the real desktop app. Same story for anyone doing long, heavily formatted documents every day.
Email + desktop apps ($42/user/mo)
Everything above, plus the full Office suite installed locally on PCs and Macs (each user can install on up to five devices). Files can be worked on offline and the apps have every feature Microsoft makes.
Who it suits: your finance team, anyone with a macro-laden spreadsheet inherited from three bookkeepers ago, power users of Word or PowerPoint, and people who work offline on planes or in the field.
Who it doesn't: the whole company by default. Paying the difference over the web tier for someone who only reads email is the single most common licensing waste we see.
Business Premium ($65/user/mo)
Everything above, plus Microsoft's advanced security stack: Defender for Office 365, Intune device management, conditional access, and the tools to enforce policies like "company data only on encrypted, compliant devices".
Who it suits: honestly, most businesses, and it's the tier we're happiest to see a whole company on. The security stack isn't executive polish; it protects every mailbox, every login and every device against the attacks that actually hit Brisbane SMBs, and it's the difference between hoping a phishing email gets spotted and having systems that catch it. Per user per month, it's some of the best value security money you can spend.
Who it doesn't: if budget genuinely won't stretch to company-wide Premium yet, start with the people who approve payments, handle sensitive data or work from anywhere, and widen from there. Starting smaller is fine. Treating that as the finish line isn't.
The three mistakes we see most
1. Licensing by habit instead of by role. The classic version is putting every user on desktop apps because "that's what Office is", when half the team would never notice the difference on web apps. Right-sizing cuts both ways, though: it also means moving the people who handle money and sensitive data up to Business Premium, not just trimming licence spend. Done properly, the savings on one side usually fund the security on the other.
2. Buying desktop apps for viewers. Many people who "need Excel" turn out to use it as a viewer. Start them on web apps; upgrading a licence later is a five-minute change, not a project.
3. Skipping Business Premium to save money. Invoice fraud and mailbox takeover attacks aim at real Brisbane businesses every week, and one successful one costs more than years of the licence-price difference. We won't hard-sell it, but if you're weighing Premium against a cheaper tier for people who touch money, contracts or client data, Premium wins that argument on maths alone.
Whatever tier you pick, the floor is the floor
One thing that doesn't change between tiers: every Otterly user gets mailbox backup and advanced anti-phishing protection as part of our minimum standard. Microsoft doesn't back up your mailbox for you, whatever tier you buy, so we do.
Ready to put numbers against names? The pricing calculator prices your whole team on one tier to keep the maths simple, so pick your most common tier there for a solid ballpark. For a proper mixed-tier quote, give us a squeak and we'll map tiers to your actual staff list.