Tag: Copilot studio licensing

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Copilot Studio feature and pricing changes


Robot with GitHub Copilot Workshop vest standing in an office with people working on laptops
A robot wearing a GitHub Copilot Workshop vest stands in a busy office with people collaborating in the background.

Microsoft have announced General Availability of a new feature within Copilot Studio – the GitHub Copilot harness. This sits alongside the already available Standard harness and Copilot Chat harness.

This new capability means your in-house created agents can now use the same coding and reasoning capabilities as Copilot Cowork and GitHub Copilot – putting new capabilities on the table for your AI agents.

While that is all well and good I would, not surprisingly, like to focus in on a licensing/pricing change. The Microsoft post casually states:

“Agents running on the GitHub Copilot harness use usage-based billing for all work, regardless of Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing.”

That, potentially, has quite the impact. Agents built using the 2 existing harnesses have their Copilot Credits covered by a user’s M365 Copilot license – this is not the case when agents are built with the GitHub Copilot harness. This means those agents will use Copilot Credits and burn pre-purchased amounts or incur PAYG costs.

To be clear, Microsoft aren’t removing anything or forcing this more expensive model on customers; the GitHub Copilot harness is a new, additional option that organisations can choose to use, or not. However it does add another potential way for people to inadvertently spend money with Microsoft and thus further highlights the need for storng internal governance and awareness/training programs.

See the Microsoft post here – More powerful agents and workflows for autonomous business processes: Introducing a new harness for Copilot Studio | Microsoft Community Hub

Check out the August 2026 Copilot Studio Licensing Guide here – Microsoft Copilot Studio Licensing Guide

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Microsoft 365 Copilot Pay As You Go (PAYG) pricing


Microsoft are huge fans of the Pay As You Go (PAYG) licensing/billing model for various products and now it has been extended for M365 Copilot and Copilot Studio.

Agents created with Copilot Studio provide answers to users, and these answers are measured in “messages:

Classic Answers

These are static answers written when the agent is created and only change when manually updated. These cost 1 message.

Generative Answers

These are dynamically generated answers using the conversation’s context and other knowledge. These cost 2 messages.

Tenant Graph grounded

This is a new option and allows agents to access internal information in SharePoint and also other sources via Graph connectors. This information will be incorporated within “generative” answers given by agents. These cost 30 messages.

This capability is included for users licensed with M365 Copilot and is also available on a PAYG basis for other users.

Autonomous Actions

As the name suggests, these agents act on their own via “generatively orchestrated triggers, topics, data connectors, and workflows” to complete tasks, answer queries etc. These cost 25 messages.

These are NOT included with the M365 Copilot license, so using agents with autonomous actions will be additional spend on top of the $30 per user per month license…which is already an add-on to your existing M365 license!

How does the pricing work?

Each message costs $0.01 which seems very low…however…it can quickly start to add up. Here is an example from Microsoft:

12,800 x $0.01 = $128 in PAYG costs.

Not a huge amount, about $33,280 per year. However, that’s for 100 users. If you had 1,000 users in that scenario it becomes $332,800 per year which is a much more significant amount…it’s about the same as buying M365 Copilot licenses for those users in fact.

You can purchase messages in bundles of 25,000 for $200 per month ($0.008 per message) which can help reduce spend a little on PAYG.

It seems likely that the behaviour Microsoft are hoping to drive will be for organisations to start out with this model and then, as spend increases, move them across to M365 Copilot licenses to increase the stickiness and adoption of their latest focus product.

You can see more from Microsoft here.

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Microsoft Copilot Studio licensing


It’s been announced that Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is now part of Copilot Studio so let’s look at the licensing for this new product.

Microsoft Copilot Studio for Microsoft Teams

Just as there is Dataverse for Teams, this is a cut-down version for use exclusively with Teams and the rights are included with “select” M365 licenses. These seem to be a way of keeping PVA available to many users and further promoting the idea that Teams is where all internal bot related scenarios should occur.

As you can see, the features are relatively limited:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-copilot-studio/requirements-licensing-subscriptions

It will be possible to acquire a full Copilot studio license via the Teams app so SAM managers beware! I’m yet to find pricing for the standalone license but will update once I see it.

  • Microsoft state that “use rights and functionality available as part of paid, standalone Power Automate subscriptions serve automation scenarios cannot be applied to Microsoft Copilot Studio scenarios“.
  • Copilot Studio entitlements are also included within D365 Customer Service Digital Messaging and Chat add-ons.

The Microsoft page is here.

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