Why Office Unbound · Cost & licensing
What open source makes free,
and what it does not.
An open-source platform removes the per-user software subscription. It does not remove the cost of running a productivity service. This page sets out where the costs are, who usually bears them, and why Office Unbound makes no savings claims.
Project status There is no Office Unbound pricing, because there is no product to price. No license has been selected for Office Unbound’s own code, and support arrangements are not yet defined.
No license fee is not the same as no cost
A Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace subscription bundles several things into one per-user price: the right to use the software, the infrastructure it runs on, the people who operate and secure it, storage, backup of the service itself, and a support channel. Because they arrive as one line on an invoice, it is easy to compare that line against “free” open-source software and conclude that the alternative costs nothing.
It does not. When the software license fee goes away, every other item in the bundle remains, and someone has to provide and pay for it — the organization itself, its MSP, or both. For some organizations, those costs together will be lower than a subscription; for others, especially small organizations without existing infrastructure or IT staff, they will be higher. The difference is that each one becomes visible and, to a degree, controllable.
Office Unbound’s aim is to give organizations an alternative to mandatory bundled subscriptions where licensing and operating costs make sense for them. It does not aim, or claim, to be cheaper in every case.
The cost components
What a self-operated or MSP-operated platform costs, item by item, and who usually pays. Actual arrangements vary with each deployment and each MSP contract. The table scrolls sideways on narrow screens.
| Component | What this cost covers | Customer‑hosted | MSP‑hosted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open-source software licensing | The right to use, study, modify and redistribute the software under its license. Normally no fee, but with obligations attached. | No fee; customer meets license obligations | No fee; MSP meets obligations for what it hosts and distributes |
| Optional commercial component licenses | Commercial editions or subscriptions some upstream projects sell — additional features, scale limits removed, or vendor support. | Customer, if chosen | MSP, usually passed into its service price |
| Hosting | Rack space, power, cooling and physical security — or rented servers or private cloud capacity. | Customer | MSP, within its service fee |
| Infrastructure | Servers, the virtualization platform, firewalls and the hardware replacement cycle. | Customer | MSP |
| Storage | Capacity for mailboxes, files and databases, with redundancy against disk failure. Grows every month. | Customer | MSP, often charged per quota |
| Network bandwidth | Internet connectivity with enough upload capacity for file sync and meetings, and a clean public IP address for mail. | Customer | MSP |
| Backup | Backup storage off the primary hardware, ideally off site, plus the time to test restores. | Customer | MSP, sometimes as a separate service |
| Administrative labor | Monitoring, updates, user administration, troubleshooting and incident response. Usually the largest hidden cost. | Customer’s IT staff | Mostly MSP; day-to-day user administration may stay with the customer |
| Managed service fees | What an MSP charges to deliver and operate the platform. | Not applicable | Customer |
| Support arrangements | Escalation for software defects beyond what the operator can fix. Office Unbound support options are not yet defined. | Customer, if arranged | MSP, if arranged |
| Optional email security services | Additional filtering beyond the built-in spam and malware scanning, such as MailThreatZero. | Customer, if chosen | MSP or customer, if chosen |
| Telephony carrier charges | SIP trunks, phone numbers, call minutes and number porting from a telephony provider. | Customer | Customer, often billed through the MSP |
| Migration | Assessment, transfer, verification and cutover from the current platform; a one-time project cost. | Customer | Customer, usually delivered by the MSP |
| Training and change | Helping users adjust to a new interface and new habits. | Customer | Customer, sometimes with MSP help |
Understanding open-source licensing
The license is the part most often misunderstood, in both directions.
- What it grants
- The right to run the software for any purpose, read and modify its source, and redistribute it, subject to the license’s conditions. That right does not expire and does not depend on a subscription remaining paid.
- What it does not include
- Hosting, operation, support, warranty or anyone to call. Open-source licenses typically disclaim warranty explicitly.
- What it requires
- Conditions vary by license. Permissive licenses mainly require keeping notices. Copyleft licenses require sharing source for modified versions; network copyleft licenses such as the AGPL extend that to software offered to users over a network, which matters to MSPs. Several candidate components use the AGPL.
- Commercial editions
- Several upstream projects fund their development by selling commercial editions, subscriptions or support alongside the open-source release. Some features or deployment sizes may be practical only with those. The licensing review in Phase 1 records where this applies before any component is selected.
- Trademarks and branding
- Code licenses rarely cover names and logos. Redistributing or rebranding a component can require separate permission.
- Office Unbound’s own license
- Not yet selected. It will be chosen to be compatible with the integrated components and with MSP hosting, and announced with its reasoning. Nothing on this site should be read as a promise that every component is free for unlimited commercial use.
Comparing costs honestly
If you are weighing Office Unbound against a subscription once it is available, compare like with like.
Use a multi-year period
Hardware and migration are front-loaded; subscriptions are spread evenly. Compare over the life of the hardware.
Count labor
Include the staff or MSP time to operate the platform, not only the hardware.
Count what the subscription includes
Security operations, compliance evidence, add-on features in your plan and support all have a value that must be replaced or consciously dropped.
Include the move
Migration, training and a period of running both systems are real costs.
Price the risks
Weigh the cost of future vendor price changes against the cost of operating your own infrastructure well.
Where costs tend to land
Without inventing figures, some patterns are predictable.
- Organizations that already run infrastructure and have IT staff absorb much of the cost into what they already pay for.
- MSPs spread infrastructure and expertise across many customers, which is why MSP-hosted is expected to be the common model for smaller businesses.
- A very small organization with no IT and no MSP relationship is unlikely to find self-hosting cheaper than a subscription.
- Storage-heavy organizations should look closely at storage and backup, which grow every year.
- Telephony costs depend mainly on the carrier, whatever the platform.
Why there are no savings figures here
A savings percentage would require prices that do not exist, measured operating costs from deployments that have not happened, and assumptions about your organization that this page cannot know. Any number published now would be invented, so none is.
What the project can say is where control shifts. With a subscription, the vendor sets the price and changes it. With an open-source platform, the organization or its MSP decides how much hardware to buy, how much redundancy is worth paying for, which optional commercial components to use and which provider to work with — and can change those decisions later without changing platform.
Office Unbound does not claim to be free, to be cheaper than Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, or to deliver any particular saving. It does not claim that all candidate components are free for unlimited commercial use. Pricing for any future support or managed offering has not been set.
Working out whether it would make sense for you?
Tell us what you pay for and run today. We cannot give you a price, but your answers shape how the platform is packaged and documented.