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The seat stays, the meter is new

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A steel rail on a wall holding blank job cards on hooks, each with a lead weight hanging from it, the weights differing sharply so that one card is pulled out of line.AI generated
Copilot Cowork is now generally availableMicrosoft 365 Blog

One cent. That is what a Copilot Credit costs on pay-as-you-go, and with it Microsoft 365 has had something since 16 June 2026 that it did not have before: a capability billed not per user but per task. Copilot Cowork is generally available worldwide, requires the Microsoft 365 Copilot User Subscription Licence and bills by consumption on top of it.

What the price of a task contains

The price of a task comes from four inputs: model use, context retrieval, tool calls and runtime. That is an honest list, because it names exactly the places where an agentic run gets expensive, rather than only the tokens.

From the Frontier period Microsoft derived three task patterns. Light tasks use few knowledge sources, apply limited reasoning and produce at most one output. Medium tasks draw on several sources, structure the reasoning and deliver two or more outputs. Heavy tasks aggregate broadly, reason deeply and produce many outputs. On top of that sit four user personas with different mixes.

For budgeting, Microsoft provides a spreadsheet in which you multiply users per segment by expected task volume by price per task type. The assumption behind it is Anthropic Opus 4.8.

There are two payment routes: pay-as-you-go at one cent per credit, or P3, a commitment to a volume in advance in exchange for a discount.

The seat model has cracked

The dispatch on AI gateways drew a clean line: what runs on API keys can be controlled, what is billed per seat stays outside. Cowork moves that line.

The seat is still the ticket, the USL remains a prerequisite. But behind the ticket there is now a meter, and it runs in the same currency you already know from Copilot Studio. The question "what does one operation cost us" moves out of the platform world and into the workplace world, where nobody has been doing FinOps.

That is not a criticism, it is a question of ownership. Who in your organisation sets the budget for a department's assistant work?

Cost control is better than I expected

Cowork is off by default. Admins decide when it is enabled in the tenant and who gets access.

Beyond that there are spending limits at three levels, tenant, group and individual user, through scoped billing policies with budgets, including per-user caps set inside a group policy. Alert thresholds are configurable, as is who gets notified. If someone needs additional credits to finish a task, they can request them from inside Cowork.

On the reporting side there is usage data at those same three levels, broken down by user, group and feature. And the point that matters most for acceptance: users see the price of each task in credits while it runs.

Compare that with what Copilot Studio offers, where per-agent limits exist but do not add up to an environment limit and notifications go to administrators rather than the owner. Here there is markedly more tooling in the hands of the people who pay.

Two things to know before you switch it on

Data Loss Prevention was missing at GA. Present are the audit log, Data Security Posture Management, eDiscovery, Insider Risk Management, Data Lifecycle Management since 22 June, and Communication Compliance. Prompts, responses and generated artefacts flow through existing Microsoft 365 controls, and sensitivity labels are inherited and displayed. DLP is announced and was not there at GA. If DLP is the load-bearing control for a given data space in your organisation, that is your exclusion criterion for that data space, not for Cowork as a whole.

At GA Cowork runs on Anthropic models, specifically Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 4.6, with GPT 5.5 additionally available in Frontier. That ties Cowork to the setting for Anthropic as a Microsoft subprocessor, and for tenants in the EU, EFTA and the UK, enabling it means processing happens outside the EU Data Boundary. It is the same setting I described in the dispatch on the EU data zone, this time attached to a capability your people genuinely want to use.

For a European organisation that is the actual decision. Not whether Cowork is good, but whether that setting is allowed to be on.

What I cannot assess

Microsoft states an average cost advantage of 30 to 40 per cent over Claude Cowork with its Microsoft 365 connector. The footnote discloses the method: 125 test runs across twelve prompts, both on Opus 4.8, internal logs against public API rates. That is a vendor comparison with a cleanly documented method, and it remains a vendor comparison. Your numbers depend on your task mix.

Also open is the announced Cowork 1 model, which is meant to work at substantially lower cost. It was not available at GA. A calculation built on it is a bet.

My recommendation

Do not switch on Cowork, switch on a billing policy. In that order. A pilot group with a budget, an alert threshold and a named recipient for the alert takes twenty minutes to set up and turns an open meter into an experiment with a lid.

Then measure for two weeks before you budget. Microsoft's spreadsheet is a usable starting point, but it does not know your task mix. After two weeks you do.

And settle the subprocessor question in writing before the pilot group starts. Not afterwards, when the works council asks.

I consider Cowork the most honest pricing Microsoft has built in the Copilot space so far. Automate a lot and you pay a lot, automate little and you pay little, and the user sees the price while it accrues. My reservation concerns the organisation behind it: a variable cost item needs an owner with a budget, and in most organisations that role does not exist for workplace software. Settle it before the first invoice, not after.

Sources

Microsoft 365