We put spending caps on all our clients’ Copilot usage so there are no surprise bills.
Microsoft’s Copilot Cowork bills by usage – you pay for every bit you use. Handy, right up until it’s running in the background & nobody’s watching the meter.
What happened
One client was capped at 30,000 Copilot credits for the month. A couple of days before month-end they’d nearly run it out – mid-job, needed to finish – so they rang & asked us to bump the cap to 40,000.
We bumped it. Done. No surprise bill – they just made a call, knowing exactly where they stood.
Why we cap every client
I won’t put a pay-by-usage AI tool in front of a client without a cap on it.
Rough costing: Microsoft bills Copilot at about US$0.01 per credit on pay-as-you-go, so a 30,000-credit month is around US$300 (about NZ$520).
Copilot Cowork calls them credits, not tokens. If you’re thinking in tokens: Microsoft charges 10 credits per 1,000 tokens, so 1 token is 0.01 credits.
Our advice
Running Copilot Cowork, or anything that bills by usage? Put a budget on it from day one. And whichever AI tool you use, make it a paid business version – free ChatGPT is no place for client data.
Want a hand setting one up? Have a look at how we help with AI or get in touch – nice and simple.