What Business Basic is
Business Basic is the cheapest Microsoft 365 plan a company can buy: AU$10.50 per user per month ex GST on an annual subscription, or AU$12.60 month-to-month (checked September 2026 on microsoft.com/en-au). It is capped at 300 users, like every plan in the Business family. For that you get Exchange Online email with Outlook, Microsoft Teams for chat, meetings and calling, 1 TB of OneDrive per user, SharePoint team sites, and the web and mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Microsoft's plan page also lists a dozen smaller services — Bookings, Planner and Forms among them — plus the free Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. What it does not include is the part most buyers miss: there are no installable desktop Office apps at all.
The mailbox size note
Two Microsoft sources disagree on the mailbox. The Exchange Online service description on Microsoft Learn lists a 50 GB primary mailbox and a 50 GB archive for Business Basic and Business Standard, with only Business Premium stepping up to a 1.5 TB auto-expanding archive. Microsoft's Australian plan comparison page, by contrast, now shows 100 GB primary storage for Business Basic (both checked September 2026). Frontrow's advice is to plan on 50 GB until the service description catches up, and to move any user who regularly carries more than that onto Business Premium or an Exchange Online Plan 2 licence rather than relying on a marketing page. Either way, a mailbox that big is a retention problem, not a storage problem.
What Business Basic lacks
Business Basic is a productivity licence, not a security licence. Compared with Business Premium (AU$32.90 per user per month ex GST, checked September 2026), it has no Microsoft Intune device management, no Microsoft Defender for Business endpoint protection, no Defender for Office 365 Plan 1 anti-phishing, no Entra ID P1 Conditional Access and no Purview Information Protection or data loss prevention. It also lacks the desktop apps that Microsoft 365 Apps for business (AU$15.80) and Business Standard (AU$21.00) carry. For an Australian business trying to reach Essential Eight Maturity Level 1, Basic contributes email and identity basics only — application control, patching visibility and MFA policy enforcement all need Premium's components or standalone add-ons.
Who should buy it
Business Basic suits users who genuinely live in a browser: frontline and deskless staff who need email, Teams and a shared calendar; casual and seasonal workers; volunteers and board members at a not-for-profit; and any role where a licence is really about having a mailbox and a Teams identity. It is also a legitimate base for the Microsoft 365 Copilot Business add-on, so a Basic user can still be given Copilot if the work justifies it. The mistake Frontrow sees most often is the opposite: a whole company on Basic because it is cheap, then paying separately for antivirus, a backup tool and an MFA product that Business Premium already bundles. Mix plans by role — Basic for the browser-only cohort, Premium for everyone who handles company data on a laptop.