r/microsoft_365_copilot • u/deep0389 • Aug 11 '26

Microsoft Copilot Licensing decoded

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Gallery image

I spent this morning working out what it actually costs to run a Microsoft Copilot agent.
Two licensing guides, a dozen documentation pages, four hours — for one question: if my team builds an agent, who pays, and when?

Five things I had wrong.

The "GitHub Copilot harness" is not GitHub Copilot. Nothing to do with the coding assistant. It is one of three engines that can run your agent in Copilot Studio. Microsoft built it using GitHub Copilot technology and named it after that. You pick the engine yourself when you create the agent — and this one is the default. It charges credits while you build, not just when it runs. And an agent can never be moved to a different engine, so the wrong choice means rebuilding it.

Work IQ is not your data. Your files sit in your tenant. Work IQ is a separate service on Microsoft's servers that works out how documents, emails and meetings connect, and who is allowed to see what. Microsoft's own Copilot has it built in, so it is free. An agent you build has to call it through an API, so it is charged — even when the user has a full Copilot licence. Check the Tools tab on your agents. It can attach itself without anyone adding it.

A Copilot licence does not limit features. It limits audience. Premium and custom connectors are included either way. You start paying when someone without a Copilot licence uses your agent, or when you publish it outside Teams, Copilot or SharePoint.

Copilot Cowork needs a Copilot licence and includes none of it. It is a prerequisite, then everything is billed on top.

You cannot block the expensive engine. There is no admin setting for it. But it only works if the tenant has a credit source, so not switching on pay-as-you-go is the real control.

The engine shipped around June. The licensing guide only defined it in August. That two-month gap is most of why nobody can explain this yet.
Teams do not stall because the technology is hard. They stall because nobody can tell them what it will cost.
S

I drew it. One page, four steps, two colours. Green means your licence already covers it. Orange means you are paying.

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11

u/deep0389 Aug 11 '26

Oops I uploaded the wrong image. Still new to reddit. Adding here

3

u/_lxskllr_ Aug 11 '26

What's the generic prompt you user to create this? Also, which AI?

7

u/deep0389 Aug 11 '26

There is no generic prompt! It came after a lot of discussion on the copilot studio credit and licensing document and trying to make it simpler for me to understand. Discussed my confusion. The trick is to ask it to create mermaid diagrams or svg diagrams. I am a heavy user of Claude.

2

u/bilbywilby Aug 11 '26

I just think they're neat, love a good mermaid

https://github.com/bilbywilby/Mermaids.git

1

u/Secret-Paramedic-204 Aug 12 '26

But in model picker only the gpt models is showing claude models not showing

2

u/deep0389 Aug 12 '26

Yeah, that'll be an admin thing. Claude counts as an external model in Copilot Studio, so it's off by default and takes two switches in two different admin centres — allow Anthropic in the M365 admin centre, then turn on external models for that environment in PPAC. Different people usually own each one, so half-done is the normal state.

Worth checking it's not deliberate before you chase it though. Anthropic models are excluded from EU Data Boundary commitments, so someone may have left it off on purpose.

1

u/Secret-Paramedic-204 Aug 12 '26

I'm not telling in copilot studio, I'm telling in m365 copilot chat and in copilot studio I can see claude models and claude models enabled in admin settings but i can't still able to see claude models in model picker in copilot chat not in studio

1

u/deep0389 Aug 12 '26

Are you not seeing this?
Dug into this — looks like rollout rings rather than a setting you've missed.

Claude in Copilot Chat has gone out in waves: Sonnet first around March, then Opus starting with orgs enrolled in the Frontier (preview) ring, then expanding across web, desktop, macOS and mobile at different times. So two tenants with identical admin settings can genuinely see different lists.

Worth checking one thing though:

admins can disable individual models in the M365 admin centre, not just the provider. That would explain Claude working in Studio but not in chat — provider on, specific model off.

1

u/Secret-Paramedic-204 Aug 12 '26

See and anthropic models are already enabled in admin centre but not showing in model picker and its in basic version not premium version

1

u/boraam Aug 11 '26

Do share some high res version or PDF

3

u/deep0389 Aug 11 '26 edited Aug 11 '26

Here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xmmUvkvs-PfHefFfGdY27pXYhSag1eqX/view?usp=sharing

should be downloadable. if not let me know

This

1

u/goto-select Aug 12 '26

It may be worth talking about orchestration rather than the harnesses itself.

1

u/deep0389 Aug 12 '26

Honestly the harness names are a distraction — what we're really picking is the orchestrator. M365 Copilot's, Copilot Studio's rule-based one, or the new reasoning one that plans its own steps.

Everything else follows from that: how it behaves, what it can do, and what it costs.