Key findings
- A pack of 25,000 credits costs US$200 a month and pay-as-you-go bills US$0.01 per credit; unused prepaid credits expire monthly.
- A classic answer costs 1 credit, a generative answer 2, an agent action 5, tenant graph grounding 10, and agent flows 13 per 100 actions.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot licence holders consume no credits for answers and grounding when they use agents in Copilot Chat, Teams and SharePoint.
- Messages became Copilot Credits on Sep 1, 2025, with no change in pack quantity or pay-as-you-go rate.
Copilot Studio meters nearly everything an agent does in Copilot Credits, and Microsoft 365 Copilot licences cover some of it. What an agent costs therefore depends on who uses it, through which channel, and how much grounding and how many actions each conversation triggers. Admins and makers report cost surprises and governance gaps that follow from this model.
How credits meter an agent
Every feature has a credit rate. A conversation that grounds an answer in tenant data and calls one action costs about 17 credits: 2 for the generative answer, 10 for grounding and 5 for the action. Agent flows meter 13 credits per 100 actions.
Credits pool across the tenant. Packs buy 25,000 a month at US$200, pay-as-you-go bills US$0.01 each through an Azure subscription, and a one-year prepurchase plan is also sold. Prepaid credits that go unused expire at the end of each month.
What the Microsoft 365 Copilot licence covers
Users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence at US$30 a month can use agents in Copilot Chat, Teams and SharePoint for classic answers, generative answers and tenant graph grounding without consuming credits. Agent flows and agents reached through other channels, such as a website, still meter credits.
So the same agent costs nothing for licensed employees in Teams and meters credits for customers on a website.
What admins and makers report
A maker on r/copilotstudio reported in October 2026 that the GitHub Copilot harness worked well but the boss balked at the cost, and the team rebuilt its agents on the standard harness. Admins report that tenant-wide credit pools make departmental chargeback hard.
Security researchers add a second cost. Zenity Labs showed email-triggered prompt injection exfiltrating data from an agent connected to Salesforce, and Tenable got a test agent to leak card data and book a free trip.
Methodology
GILD built this piece from Microsoft's Copilot Studio pricing page, licensing and billing rates documentation, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing page, all checked Oct 28, 2026. The 17-credit conversation is GILD's calculation from Microsoft's published rates. Practitioner and security research accounts are public pages dated 2025 or later, linked in Sources.
Products in this piece
Sources
- Official documentation
- 4
- Public source
- 4
- Microsoft: Copilot Studio plans and pricing
- Azure: Copilot Studio pricing (pay-as-you-go)
- Microsoft Learn: Copilot Studio licensing
- Microsoft Learn: Copilot Studio billing rates and management
- r/copilotstudio: standard agent and subagents in Teams, on GitHub Copilot harness costs (Oct 20, 2026)
- r/PowerPlatform: Chargeback in the AI Builder and Copilot Credits model (Jul 2, 2026)
- Zenity Labs: A Copilot Studio story 2, when AIjacking leads to full data exfiltration (Jul 7, 2025)
- Tenable: Microsoft Copilot Studio security risk, how simple prompt injection leaked sensitive data (Dec 11, 2025)