Copilot Agents: How to Avoid Surprising Licensing Costs

• Licensing updates to Copilot Studio bring new pay-as-you-go meters for certain agents.
• The licensing model remains in flux with changes arriving almost monthly.
• Agent usage is included with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses but only for certain deployment options.
• Customers should understand the new model and deployment scenarios to avoid unexpected costs.

Copilot Studio, a component of the Power Platform that lets citizen developers create “agents,” received updates to its licensing model in Jan. 2025 and more changes in Apr. 2025. Agents are charged via pay-as-you-go (PAYG) meters that count the consumption of a Microsoft-defined unit called messages. Customers should understand how messages are consumed to budget for agent costs and avoid billing surprises.

PAYG and Counting Messages

Copilot Studio can be used by low-code and no-code developers (also known as citizen developers and makers) to build agents from scratch or with starter templates. Agents are generative AI-based assistants that can be interactive (via natural language) or autonomous (invoked by an event trigger or on a schedule). They can be grounded with specific customer data, such as the files in a SharePoint Online site, and they can run processes such as Power Automate flows and call external service APIs to perform custom tasks.