The Copilot portfolio is usually drawn as a hub with spokes, one AI layer across productivity, data, development, security, and business apps. That picture is wrong in a specific and expensive way. There is no hub. There are six commercial models, each with its own rate, its own meter, and its own invoice.
Every published Copilot seat price sits on top of a base license that isn't shown, and none of them covers the consumption meters running underneath. The same agent can post a line to your Microsoft 365 invoice for its governance seat and a line to your Azure invoice for its execution, owned by two teams, on two budgets, with no shared view. Budgeting Copilot as one line item is how the overage arrives as a surprise.
Published US list rates as of August 2026. Each one bills differently and lands on a different invoice.
$30 per user / month, annual commitment, on top of a qualifying base license.
Microsoft 365 admin center · M365 invoice
$19 and $39 per user / month, plus AI Credits metered on token use since June 2026.
GitHub billing · separate agreement
Requires paid Fabric F2 or higher, or Power BI Premium P1 or higher. Pro and PPU do not qualify.
Azure or Power BI capacity · Azure invoice
Security Compute Units billed hourly on provisioned capacity, with a separate overage rate.
Azure subscription · Azure invoice
$200 per 25,000-credit pack per month, or roughly $0.01 per credit pay-as-you-go.
Power Platform admin and Azure · split invoices
$15 per user / month, or bundled in Microsoft 365 E7 at $99.
Microsoft 365 admin center · M365 invoice
Read the full 22-page report for the credit arithmetic, where a single grounded prompt runs from 1 credit to 12, and the scenarios for how the meters move next.
This isn't a vendor summary. Every sentence is labeled by what stands behind it: verified fact, vendor claim, third-party estimate, my assessment, hypothesis, or scenario. Sources are numbered and clickable. Forward-looking sections use scenarios with observable tripwires, not forecasts. It's the same method behind every market assessment I write.
Twenty-two pages, built from public sources with no client brief and no interviews. Read it in the browser or take the PDF.
Each report here answers a real question, directed and researched against public sources and evaluated against a stated assumption, then delivered as Word and PDF. If you're weighing a platform, sizing a category, or defending a number to a board, tell me the decision behind it and I'll tell you honestly whether a report is the right tool.
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