this post was submitted on 13 May 2026
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I wonder how much money the government is saving on Windows licences alone
I just checked Microsoft's website. They're trying to make windows enterprise a subscription model. The current cost for what they're calling "windows 365" is $99/yr per user. They're saving nearly $250 million a year, or €211 Million
Windows 365 is the "cloud PC" that Microsoft is hosting as a VM in Azure. So you have a thin client that only connects to the VM over the internet. It's very niche and pretty expensive. Regular windows licenses, especially with their volume of licensing will be a lot less. But they still save millions on licenses, especially for the M365 office licenses that they now no longer need.
License costs for Windows alone for one single Bundesland in Germany are 15 Mio EUR a year, I read, and that doesn't include other costs. France is probably paying Microsoft in the hundreds of millions currently. You can do a lot on your own with that kind of money, especially when using everything open source has to offer, as basis.
I'm seems pretty reasonable for a cloud PC.
I just ran the costs through the Azure calculator, and a D2asV6 system with a 100GB drive and licenseing running 16hrs a day, 30 days a month would cost approximately 1200 dollars annually, so 99 bucks a year seems like a steal.
And a D2asV6 is not a lot of compute power. 2 cores, 8Gb ram.
In summary, Azure is fucking expensive if you are keeping VMs online all the time.
Wouldn't you have to include user CALs as well? Im long out of windows land thankfully but I do recall needing those.