Now that I have set up pay as you go (PAYG) Copilot Studio via an Azure subscription, the next big question is what are the costs likely to be? These are somewhat hard to quantify exactly because it ‘depends’ on a lot of factors.

Start with:

Copilot Studio licensing here:

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

which says:

• Pay-as-you-go: $0.01 per message

but then it isn’t a simple ratio of 1 question = 1 message, oh no. You need to look at this:

Message scenarios

which gives you this table:

The example Microsoft provides is:

Each interaction with an agent might utilize multiple message types simultaneously. For example, an agent grounded in a tenant Microsoft Graph could use 32 messages (30 messages for the Microsoft Graph grounding, and two for generative answers) to respond to a single complex prompt from a user.

Agent costs depend on an agent’s complexity and its usage.

Inside the Power Platform admin center, under licensing and Copilot Studio I see this:

if I drill into this a little more I find:

Ok, so 2,040 messages is the usage.

I then waited and checked my Azure billing for the period and it reports:

which is AU$20.30 for Copilot Studio usage across those 2,040 messages I suggest. If you divide the cost by the messages you come out to around that suggested $0.01 per message as expected.

How does that relate to usage? Again, hard to exactly quantify as I was the only user and I was building and testing an autonomous agent with Copilot Studio for around 8 hours roughly. Thus, that means an average of 255 AI message per hour or 4.25 messages per minute.

Based on that, the best estimate (rule of thumb) I could give you would be, based on ‘average use’ across a typical day (8 hours), for a single user using Copilot regularly throughout the day the cost is going you around AU$20 per user for that 8 hours of sustained usage.

I fully appreciate this is nowhere near exact but, so far it is the best average I can come up with for sustained daily usage.

If we assume that a ‘normal’ user is not going to using AI in the sustained manner across the whole day we could then apply say a 50% usage discount and settle on around AU$10 per user per day for an ‘average’ user using Copilot resources in an ‘average’ way per day. More intensive usage would be considered around AU$20 per user per day I suggest.

In summary then, via my imperfect observations and calculations I would suggest to you that if you do indeed implement Copilot service via Pay As You Go (PAYG) then the ‘typical’ costs you can expect would be around AU$10 per user per day up to AU$20 per user per day. If this was sustained across a full month then you would be looking at $300 per average user per month which is way above the cost of a full license of Microsoft 365 Copilot whih which would be a flat fee of around AU$45 per user per month.

This is the best estimate I can give you and your costs and usage will vary but I think $10 per user per day for average Copilot use on a PAYG plan is as good as any place to start.

Clearly then, if your users are planning on sustained Microsoft 365 Copilot usage a paid license of Microsoft 365 Copilot is a much more effective investment from what I can determine.