Copilot Cowork just went pay-per-use, two weeks after we demoed it.

A fortnight ago we ran a webinar walking clients through Copilot Cowork: the feature that takes a whole task off your hands and comes back with the finished work, not a draft. On 16 June 2026 Microsoft made it generally available, and the same announcement put it on a meter. If you bought Microsoft 365 Copilot partly to get this, the timing stings.

The feature you bought Copilot for now costs extra

Cowork spent its preview inside Microsoft’s Frontier programme. On 16 June it went generally available, and Microsoft switched on usage billing with it. The Copilot licence still applies, around US$30 per user per month, just to have access. Cowork now charges again, on top, for the work it does.

For a lot of buyers, Cowork was the reason to license Copilot in the first place. It was the capability in the demos, the one that justified the spend to the board. That capability is now a separate, metered bill. And Copilot is usually sold on an annual commitment, so the obvious response, cancelling, is off the table for most people until renewal.

What “pay-per-use” actually means

Microsoft meters Cowork in a usage currency it calls Copilot Credits, at one US cent each, either pay-as-you-go or pre-committed for a discount. The price of a task is built from four things: the model it runs, the context it pulls in, the tools it calls, and how long it runs.

Microsoft did soften the start in one way. Tenants that used Cowork during the Frontier preview get a grace period and are not billed until 1 July 2026. Everyone else is on the meter now.

So now it’s a numbers exercise

The capability is real, and used well it earns its keep, but only with the scaffolding around it: staff who are trained, a set of shared skills and approved connectors so forty people are not each paying to rebuild the same workflow, and a close watch on the spend from day one.

Left unmanaged, this gets expensive fast. One scenario from a public cost calculator, built on Microsoft’s own Frontier-usage averages, models about 1,550 users at roughly A$385 per user per month, near US$418,000 a month across the sample, on top of the licences. Treat that as one heavy-usage scenario, not a forecast. If you want your own number instead of theirs, our Copilot Cowork cost calculator models it in Australian dollars from your own mix of users and tasks. The real danger is not that everyone spends that. It is that most organisations will not know what they are spending until the bill lands.

Our read

Microsoft built the controls properly. Cowork is off by default, admins choose who gets access, and you can set spending limits and alerts. Those are the right tools. Turning them on before you turn Cowork on is the difference between a managed cost and a surprise.

The blunter point is about how this landed. Moving a flagship feature behind a new meter at short notice, while many customers are part-way through an annual licence they took partly for that feature, is a rough way to treat the people who backed it early.

It leaves every business with the same two questions. Would you pay around A$385 per user per month, on top of the licence, if the output justified it? And would you give it to everyone, or hand a few people an agent that does their heavy lifting while the rest are told to keep up? Those are leadership questions, and they are better answered before the first bill than after it. If you want a hand running a controlled trial of Cowork while it is still cheap to run, get in touch.