Copilot StudioCopilot Studio agents, priced before you build.
Copilot Studio is Microsoft's tool for building agents that work in Teams, Outlook and your business systems; Microsoft Foundry is the pro-code service for agents that need more control. Both bill by use, so the first job is working out what an agent will cost per month. QServices builds on both and sizes the bill first.
Every agent turn uses credits. Add these up per conversation, times conversations a month.
| Activity | Credits | Roughly in dollars, pay-as-you-go |
|---|---|---|
| Classic answer | 1 | $0.01 |
| Generative answer | 2 | $0.02 |
| Agent action | 5 | $0.05 |
| Tenant graph grounding | 10 | $0.10 |
| Agent flow actions | 13 per 100 actions | $0.13 |
| Reasoning model | Plus 10 per 1,000 tokens | Varies |
From Microsoft Learn billing rates, October 2026. Microsoft 365 Copilot users are zero-rated for in-app employee use. Prepaid agents switch off at 125% of capacity; pay-as-you-go environments don't.
| Copilot Studio | Microsoft Foundry Agent Service | |
|---|---|---|
| Who builds | Low-code; business builders and our team | Pro-code developers |
| Best for | Agents in Teams and Outlook, approvals, flows | Agents calling ERP APIs with private networking and evaluations |
| Billing | Copilot Credits | Model tokens and tools; container compute for hosted agents |
| Identity | Users' Microsoft 365 permissions | Each agent has its own Entra identity |
One use case, its credit cost per month and a success measure.
Dev, test and production, credit limits per environment and data policies.
Agent, knowledge, actions and approvals.
Real questions, real data, measured against the success measure.
Analytics, ALM pipeline and a runbook.
Azure budgets alert but don't stop spend, so limits are set per environment.
| Azure OpenAI in Foundry | OpenAI API | |
|---|---|---|
| Data use | Not shared with other customers or used to train models | Not used for training by default |
| Where it runs | Your tenant; regional deployments keep prompts in your chosen region | Full data residency only in the US, EU and UAE |
| Identity and network | Entra ID, private networking | API keys and organisation controls |
| Billing | Through your Azure subscription | Separate OpenAI billing |
From Microsoft Learn's Azure OpenAI data privacy page and OpenAI's data controls documentation.
Prepaid packs are $200 a month for 25,000 credits, or pay-as-you-go at $0.01 a credit. A generative answer uses 2 credits and an agent action 5, so cost depends on conversations a month and how many steps each takes.
Copilot Studio for agents in Teams and Outlook with approvals and flows; Foundry when the agent calls your ERP's APIs and needs its own identity, private networking and evaluations.
Azure OpenAI if you want models inside your Azure tenant, billed through Azure, with Entra ID and private networking. The OpenAI API is simpler to start but sits outside your Microsoft tenant.
If you need agents connected to business systems, governed and costed, yes. For simple knowledge Q&A, your own team can often start alone.
Pick one use case, model its credit cost, set up environments and credit limits, build, test with users, then go live with analytics and an ALM pipeline.
Something frequent, low-risk and measurable: an IT or HR help agent, or a finance agent that drafts for a person to approve.
Facts on this page checked on 22 October 2026.
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