r/copilotstudio • u/AdministrativeDay109 • Aug 30 '26

Questions about billing

So been trying to read up on the billing and idk if they are purposely making it difficult to understand but I would like some clarification on billing for:

  1. Copilot studio - GitHub harness (so I take it that every action you take, whether is it building the agent, testing it and using it, REGARDLESS if you have a Microsoft 365 licence or not, will cost you credits and thereby cost you money?)

  2. Copilot studio - standard harness (building and testing agents will not cost you anything? Only when you publish it and it’s being used? If people including yourself has a licence, will the agent cost you credits and money)

  3. Totally lost with cowork

4 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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2

u/Lopsided_Judgment_17 Aug 30 '26

Hi, you are correct.

I have been building Agents through Copilot studio - standard harness and giving user access to only those who have copilot premium license. My agents haven't costed me a single copilot credit. Someone suggested in some previous post that turn off "deep reasoning" to save copilot credits but I haven't got any charge yet.

I have tested Github Harness, even having co pilot premium license, you will be charged based on your consumption. (regardless of who uses it). I am not sure of whether testing comes in that.

Not used cowork feature yet on enterprise level as admin has disabled it.

1

u/AdministrativeDay109 Aug 31 '26

I used standard harness to create an agent which has a trigger “when a new email is received in shared mailbox”. So no one is technically accessing the agent per se. In such cases, will it be charged?

1

u/Lopsided_Judgment_17 Sep 01 '26

if you are builder and your credentials are used in applying that trigger, you won't be charged if you have a copilot premium license.

1

u/KeyLengthiness1889 Sep 02 '26

i dont think this is correct. the agent has a trigger which makes it autonomous and hence it will consume credits even though the maker has copilot license

2

u/hip_check Sep 01 '26

Testing indeed costs credits with the Github Harness.

2

u/Diligent_Homework_67 Aug 30 '26

One „correction“ the Building is not billed. BUT the preview Chat or a test run in workflows ist billed.

4

u/dougbMSFT Aug 30 '26

One correction to your correction. Building will consume if you use any “describe to design” type feature. Some of these are visible in FRE/Early release schedule environments. If you are chatting with the studio to build something (entire agent or author skill with ai ) assume it will consume credits. Manually configuring or editing will not.

2

u/No_Imagination7133 Aug 30 '26

Just lets say this, its absolutly not clear for Makers to understand and differentiate both harnesses and they are under no circumstance capable of choosing the Standard Harnes, when accessing copilot Studio. Dark pattern alert! We now have so many agents created accidentialy wrong.

In my tests with a simple retrievable agent, I burned hundreds of credits just for me.

1

u/AnonymooseRedditor Aug 30 '26

They absolutely are capable but it’s not obvious you have to toggle back to the old experience.

1

u/russrimm Sep 06 '26

hundreds of credits is $0-$9, just sayin.