You can pay for the helper every month whether you use it or not, or pay a little each time you use it. If you use it a lot, paying monthly is cheaper. If you hardly use it, paying each time is cheaper.
A Copilot licence is a fixed monthly fee. Without one, some things, such as company agents that search your organisation's data, are paid per use in Copilot Credits. Work out how much someone would use those agents in a month, and you can see which way is cheaper for them.
For agent use alone, compare the licence (£23.10 per user per month, UK list, paid yearly) with metered Copilot Credits for the same use by an unlicensed Copilot Chat user. Tenant-graph-grounded agent turns cost 12 credits; break-even is roughly 250 such turns a month at the illustrative exchange rate. The licence also buys in-app Copilot and Work IQ, which metering doesn't replace.
Two ways to pay
Microsoft offers two routes into Copilot for people at work. Copilot Chat is included with eligible Microsoft 365 subscriptions at no extra cost. It's grounded in the web, and people can use their organisation's agents on a metered basis. The Microsoft 365 Copilot licence is a per-user add-on. Microsoft's UK enterprise price page lists it at £23.10 per user per month, paid yearly, excluding VAT, and it needs a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan.
Microsoft's pricing page and Learn documentation say licensed users can use assistive custom agents at no extra charge, while Copilot Chat users pay for custom agents that use shared tenant data through Copilot Credits.
The break-even for agent use
Here's the narrow question: if someone only cared about using company agents grounded in the organisation's data, at what point does the licence become cheaper?
Microsoft's Copilot Studio billing page gives a worked example where an agent turn grounded in the tenant graph uses 12 credits: 10 for tenant graph grounding and 2 for the generative answer. Pay-as-you-go credits cost $0.01, so that's $0.12 a turn.
The licence is priced in pounds and credits in dollars, so I need an exchange rate. I'll use $1 = £0.77 for illustration only. On that basis £23.10 is about $30, or about 3,000 credits, which is about 250 grounded agent turns a month. That's roughly 12 turns each working day.
| Grounded agent turns a month | Metered cost (12 credits each) | Cheaper option for agent use alone |
|---|---|---|
| 50 | about $6 | Metered |
| 150 | about $18 | Metered |
| 250 | about $30 | About even |
| 400 | about $48 | Licence |
Why agent use alone isn't the whole answer
The licence buys more than free agent use. Microsoft lists Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams, grounding in work data through Work IQ, and prebuilt agents such as Researcher and Analyst. Someone who would use those every day is worth a licence even with no custom agents at all.
The reverse also holds. Some newer capabilities are metered even for licensed users. Microsoft's pricing table marks Copilot Cowork as metered for Microsoft 365 Copilot users, and its September 2026 announcement says Cowork, Code and Autopilot run on usage-based billing. A licence doesn't remove those costs.
So I use the break-even as one input. For a light user who mostly asks an HR or policy agent the odd question, metered use is usually cheaper. For someone who'd live in Copilot across their apps, the licence wins before agents enter the sum.
What I'd do with a team
Split the team using real usage data, as in Light users, heavy users: splitting a team. Review the split quarterly, because people move between the groups.
What I'm still checking
Prices here are list prices checked on 11 October 2026. Enterprise agreements set their own prices, so your figure may differ, and exchange rates move. I also want to confirm how the 12-credit pattern holds for agents with several grounding calls per answer, since that would lower the break-even.
Sources
- Microsoft UK, Microsoft 365 Copilot plans and pricing for enterprise (£23.10 user/month paid yearly, excluding VAT; Cowork metered), accessed 11 October 2026.
- Microsoft Learn, Billing rates and management, Copilot Studio (12-credit example), accessed 11 October 2026.
- Microsoft Learn, Plan licensing and cost, accessed 11 October 2026.
- Official Microsoft Blog, Introducing the new Copilot with Home, Code and Autopilot, 25 September 2026, accessed 11 October 2026.