Copilot Studio credit estimator
Work out what an agent actually costs before you ship it. Enter the shape of one conversation and this prices a month of them against Microsoft’s published Copilot Credit rates — prepaid packs and pay-as-you-go, side by side.
Start from a shape
Pick the closest pattern, then adjust anything below. These mirror the billing examples in Microsoft's own documentation.
Public-facing website agent answering from policies and product manuals. Four scripted answers and two generative answers per conversation.
Volume
For an autonomous agent this is trigger fires, not people.
Use 30 for an always-on public agent, or about 21 for one that only runs on working days.
Employee-facing usage by a Microsoft 365 Copilot licensed user is zero-rated for every line in the rate table: answers, actions, grounding, agent flows, AI tools and content processing. It does not apply to voice, to computer-using agents, or to anyone outside your tenant — and for agent flows only on the 'When an agent calls the flow' trigger.
What happens in one conversation
Count the billable events an average conversation produces. A complex prompt often fires several at once.
Responses you authored by hand in a topic.
Model-generated responses over a knowledge source.
Triggers, topic transitions, deep reasoning steps and connector calls — everything that lands on the activity map. Computer-using agents bill at this rate too.
The single most expensive switch in Copilot Studio. It is per agent, so turn it off on agents that do not need Graph data.
Billed per 100 actions. Power Automate cloud flows are not billed here — they use Power Automate licensing.
Premium is also what a reasoning model bills on top of its feature rate, so a reasoning agent should be priced at this tier.
Per page, not per document. A 40-page contract is 320 credits on its own.
Capacity you already hold
Copilot Studio disables custom agents once a tenant reaches 125% of its prepaid capacity. This checks whether the agent above fits.
Where these numbers come from
Credit rates come from Copilot Studio billing rates and management on Microsoft Learn: classic answer 1, generative answer 2, agent action 5, tenant graph grounding 10, agent flow actions 13 per 100, content processing 8 per page, and prompt tools at 1 / 15 / 100 per ten responses by tier.
Packs are 25,000 credits at $200 per pack per month, pooled across the tenant and not carried over month to month. The pay-as-you-go meter bills $0.010 per credit to an Azure subscription.
The 125% figure is Microsoft’s documented enforcement threshold, at which custom agents stop responding until capacity is raised.
Rates checked August 2026. Microsoft changes prices and entitlements; treat this as an estimate and confirm against your own agreement before you commit budget.
Common questions
- Should I buy packs or use pay-as-you-go?
- Prepaid works out at $0.008 a credit against $0.010 on the meter, so packs are cheaper per credit — but only if you use the whole pack, because unused credits do not carry over. Pay-as-you-go is the safer starting point while usage is unpredictable, and it also removes the 125% enforcement cliff, since overage simply bills to Azure. Most tenants end up with packs covering the steady baseline and a billing policy absorbing the spikes.
- Why is my agent so much more expensive than the estimate?
- Almost always tenant graph grounding, which is 10 credits every time it fires and is a per-agent switch that is easy to leave on. After that it is content processing at 8 credits a page, and reasoning models, which bill the premium prompt-tool rate on top of the normal feature rate. A single interaction can bill several lines at once — a grounded generative answer is 12 credits, not 2.
- Do Power Automate cloud flows consume Copilot Credits?
- No. Cloud flows are licensed under Power Automate and are never billed as Copilot Credits or subject to Copilot Studio enforcement. Only agent flows built in Copilot Studio consume credits, at 13 credits per 100 actions.
- What does a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence actually cover?
- For employee-facing agents where the user is authenticated with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, every line in the rate table is zero-rated, subject to fair use: classic answers, generative answers, agent actions, tenant graph grounding, AI tools, content processing, and agent flows on the 'When an agent calls the flow' trigger. Agent flows on any other trigger bill at the standard rate. Voice, computer-using agents, and anyone outside your tenant are not covered.
- What happens if we run out of credits mid-month?
- Microsoft allows a grace band, then at 125% of prepaid capacity custom agents are disabled — an in-flight conversation finishes, and every attempt after that is rejected with a billing message. Agent flows are stricter: new runs are blocked as soon as prepaid capacity is exhausted. You can cap individual agents in the Power Platform admin center under Licensing > Copilot Studio > Manage Agents before that happens.
Estimating is the easy part
Knowing which agents, flows and apps are actually running in your tenant is the hard part. Cartographer inventories every component across every environment, so a credit estimate is based on what exists rather than what people remember building.
Keep going
Which licence do I need?
Five questions instead of a sixty-page PDF. Covers Power Apps, Power Automate, Copilot Studio and Dynamics 365.
Dataverse capacity calculator
Model your entitlement, cross-capacity borrowing and what an overage actually costs at $40 a gigabyte.
Power Platform request limits
Check whether your licence mix covers the API requests your flows and apps generate every day.
Agent governance policy
A Copilot Studio governance policy in Word, ready to adapt and adopt. Free, in exchange for a work email.