Ok, deep breath before we start. In. Out. Let’s start.
If you want to purchase Copilot Credits for use with Cowork you’’ll need access to https://admin.microsoft.com. Then you’ll need to navigate to Copilot | Cost Management | Configuration. You’ll then need to select Buy prepaid credits. Then you need to select a Subscription, then How many credits you want from the table that displays.
Upon selection, you’ll be shown the price and then you can pay via the Checkout.
If you look closely you’ll also see this.
So, billing is measured in CCCUs. 1 x CCCU = 100 credits. CCCU means Copilot Credit Commit Unit.
Given that this PAYG style billing is applied against an existing Azure subscription, if you go into the Azure portal and locate Reservations you find another location where you can pay:
Again, here, we have Copilot Credit Pre-Purchase Plans measured in CCCUs.
At the lowest prepaid tier you get 5% discount and at the pre-paid top tier you get a 20% discount, with remaining tiers in between these two. Any overage returns to be being billed with no discount at the base rate.
If you now look at how usage is reported, you see it is reported in Copilot Credits, not CCCUs. So CCCUs appear to be a billing construct only.
Thus, if we focus on just the Copilot Credits (not CCCUs) we get the Microsoft quoted US$0.01 per Copilot Credit. Thus, the above consumption cost becomes 1,574 x US$0.01 = US$15.74 in real money.
Thus, to enable Copilot Cowork going forward you will need:
– M365 License (e.g. M365 Business Premium)
– M365 Copilot license (to enable premium Copilot capabilities like Cowork)
– An Azure subscription for Copilot Cowork to be billed against
– Cowork consumption and billing is tenant wide, not per user
That will bill Copilot Cowork at a PAYG rate of $0.01 per Copilot Credit. A simple average would be to assume each Cowork interaction will consume around 400 credits. That is, around US$4 every time ANY user uses Cowork. This is because Cowork interactions vary on how many credits they use based on their complexity of the request and actions taken.
You can pre-purchase Copilot Cowork credits at average discounted rates starting from US$0.0095 down to $0.0080 (i.e. 5 – 20% discount) for a fixed annual commitment.
Annual pre-paid Copilot Cowork credits are measured in Copilot Credit Commit Units (CCCUs) which have the ratio of 100 credits per 1 CCCU. The entry level CCCU is 3,000 which provides 300,000 credits across all users in the tenant.
These credits can be purchased from the M365 admin portal or the Azure portal (vis Reservations).
An administrator can restrict Copilot Cowork in various ways to control costs but that is the subject for additional post.
….. and we are done. Breath. In. Out.
CIAOPS 
