The most effective way to reduce endpoint management costs after the July 1, 2026 Microsoft 365 price rise isn’t another tool — it’s fewer of them. If your Microsoft 365 bill climbed this month, the savings aren’t inside Microsoft; they’re in everything stacked around it. Microsoft raised Microsoft 365 E3 to $39 and E5 to $60 per user per month and folded the Intune Suite into E5, and part of it into E3, at no separate charge (Microsoft’s announcement). The license got more capable — which makes 2026 the moment to look past it and count the tools it still doesn’t replace.
What the Bundle Covers — and What It Leaves Open
The bundle is real value for teams that used to pay for these capabilities separately. But “included in the license” is not the same as “managed end to end,” and the difference is where cost quietly stays. For teams that bought these add-ons à la carte, the left column below genuinely consolidates a slice of spend. It’s the right column that decides your 2026 budget.
| Now in the bundle | Still a separate concern |
|---|---|
| Endpoint Privilege Management (E5) | Broad third-party and in-house app lifecycle |
| Cloud PKI (E5) | Driver lifecycle |
| Enterprise App Management — curated Windows catalog (E5) | Bare-metal OS deployment |
| Remote Help, Advanced Analytics, Plan 2 (E3) | Cross-platform coverage beyond Windows |
Enterprise Application Management deploys and updates software from a curated catalog of prepackaged Windows apps — but that catalog, while expanding, doesn’t cover the full breadth of third-party and in-house applications a real estate runs; its auto-update offers no rollback or automated remediation, and it stops at Windows (Microsoft’s own documentation). Those applications are among the most exploited parts of the attack surface, yet they sit only partly inside the bundle. The license grew more capable — but drivers, provisioning, cross-platform coverage, and the long tail of applications stay separate contracts, separate agents, separate consoles, separate renewals.
How to Reduce Endpoint Management Costs Without Adding Tools
CapaOne closes those gaps from one console, so work that would otherwise mean separate tools, agents, and renewals runs on a single platform — and each open gap maps to one capability, not one more vendor. The third-party and in-house application lifecycle the catalog can’t reach runs through Application Manager, with no-code packaging, automated patching, and staged deployment across a broad portfolio. Privilege governance moves to Privilege Manager, which removes standing local admin in favor of time-bound, policy-based elevation through existing Entra ID groups, every event logged for audit. Provisioning and driver lifecycle sit in Provision Manager — cloud-native bare-metal OS deployment with no on-prem imaging infrastructure. One lightweight agent feeds all of it.
The cost model is deliberately simple. CapaOne prices per endpoint — EUR 1 per endpoint, per month, per product — and Windows customers choose up to five products while paying for a maximum of three. That collapses a set of separately negotiated point-tool contracts into one predictable line item — a total cost of ownership you can put in front of a board, not a spreadsheet of renewals to reconcile.
One Console, With or Without Intune
CapaOne runs as a complete endpoint management platform on its own, with no dependency on Intune. For the many teams that already run Intune, the two divide the work cleanly: Intune keeps enrollment and compliance where they already sit, and CapaOne owns endpoint operations end to end — the third-party patching, driver lifecycle, and privilege control Intune does not cover natively — targeting your existing Entra ID groups with no rip-and-replace.
The consolidation shows up in daily operations, not just the contract. Instead of juggling separate vendors, agents, and consoles, NIRAS runs its estate from one platform: “We manage 3,000 devices across 60 offices from one platform — without an army of admins.” The point solutions a single platform replaces also replace the context-switching and the separate audits that never appear on a license quote.
The Real Cost Question for 2026
The July price rise is not really about $3 per seat. It is a prompt to ask a larger question: how many consoles, agents, contracts, and audits does it take to keep the estate secure — and how many of those could be one?
Microsoft didn’t make endpoint management more expensive. It made redundant point tools much harder to justify.
Book a demo of the CapaOne platform to see it run on your own estate, with or without Intune.
