Visual Studio Licensing Changes

There are some great changes announced to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online licensing starting on 1 September 2015.

As you may know, Visual Studio Online is essentially the online version of Team Foundation Server. VS Online is licensed with a User Subscription Model and TFS with a traditional Server/CAL model. The first big change to the licensing is that if you buy any Visual Studio Online subscription you get a TFS CAL for the named user of the subscription, which means that that user can access VS Online or TFS or both VS Online AND TFS.

Then there’s new pricing for the VS Online Basic subscriptions: the overall price has been reduced and volume discounts have been introduced. In practical terms, this means that 45 users using VS Online Basic today costs $800/month but with the new structure will only cost $310/month.

The details for these changes are in another of Microsoft’s Brian Harry’s great blog posts (http://bit.ly/1ItZxxl) where you’ll also find the timing of the changes for all types of customers