Microsoft promotes its Microsoft 365 Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) services for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and SharePoint Agents. Admins should configure billing policies in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center so that users without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license can use these agents.
For testing purposes, I configured both PAYG services in my tenant. Notice the information about cost management.
If you open cost management, the admin center redirects to Billing > Cost Management, or admin.cloud.microsoft/?#/CostManagement.
My tenant has a billing position for this month.
I ordered free Audio Conferencing licenses. Fine and valid for this month.
At the same time, Microsoft promotes the new Copilot message consumption report, which requires an active PAYG billing policy.
From MC1069563:
To help you manage metered consumption costs for Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, we will introduce a new Message consumption usage report in the Microsoft 365 admin center. The new report will give you visibility into billed messages associated with your Microsoft 365 Copilot pay-as-you-go billing policies and includes total messages consumed, cumulative and daily time series, and messages per user, per agent, and per agent-user pair. The new report will roll out in preview. During the preview stage, the report will display a maximum of 30 days of message consumption history. Usage information from prior to May 3, 2025 will not be available in the report.
The message consumption report is in the M365 Admin Center > Reports > Usage > Microsoft 365 Copilot > Message consumption.
I conducted some tests with Prompt Coach and Writing Coach Agents for business purposes and to confirm that metered usage applies to them.
As I described in March, the Coach agents support metered usage for users without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
The message consumption report shows that I consumed 48 messages in June, which was my test with Prompt and Writing Coach.
Now I’m wondering: if I consumed those messages, why wouldn’t they be included in the M365 Cost Management report?
- At first, I thought maybe these were unbilled messages, but that doesn’t match the results from my tests in March.
- Next, I checked the Cost Management section of the connected Azure subscription. It shows the charges for my Coach agent tests. Remember the scope and the tag “m365copilotchat” for later.
As usual, Azure Cost Management remains quite opaque regarding PAYG services, and Microsoft still does not provide a user-friendly PAYG cost report.
In January, I wrote about how admins can get details for PAYG services.
I checked the costs as described.
There are two notable findings:
- Coach Agents use Microsoft Syntex billing, which is part of SharePoint Premium and also applies to SharePoint Agents.
- The messages from Coach Agents were billed under the “Agents in SharePoint” billing, even though the Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat billing policy is applied. I had two interactions with each agent, totaling four successful interactions with 12 messages each (4 × 12 messages).
Agents in SharePoint
The number of messages used: $0.01/message
Each interaction includes a question and an answer. A successful interaction uses 12 messages.
- For customers in Switzerland, Microsoft charges CHF 0.008955 per message, which is approximately USD 0.01 as documented.
For me, it’s clear that the Cost Management overview in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center does not include costs from PAYG billing services, even though Microsoft recommends using it. From my perspective, it seems Microsoft forgot to update a filter used in the cost management view.
