Copilot Cowork pricing: an open-source bill beside the credit meter

What does Copilot Cowork cost, and when is Microsoft the right buy?

Copilot Cowork runs two meters at once. Nobody reaches it without a Microsoft 365 Copilot seat. Every task it runs then bills again in Copilot Credits on top of that seat, at $0.01 a credit on pay-as-you-go (Microsoft's general-availability post, 16 June 2026). The seat is the entry ticket. The delegated work is the bill.

Budget the seat alone and the first invoice after a busy month reads like a mistake. Whether Microsoft is the cheaper correct buy comes down to who already pays for the seats. A company whose mail, files, meetings and approvals already sit in Microsoft 365 gets the shortest path: the seat is in the budget, Cowork stays off until an admin enables it, and spending limits can be set per group and per person. A team that would buy Copilot seats only to reach an agent pays $21 a seat a month for a document suite it already owns elsewhere.

What the seat buys, and where Cowork sits outside it

Microsoft lists what the seat covers, in its own words: Copilot Chat; Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams; the Work IQ context engine; a multi-model system; pre-built agents like Researcher and Analyst; and custom agents built with Agent Builder. All of it for a flat monthly fee per seat. Copilot Cowork is absent from that list. Microsoft calls it "a whole new way of working" and bills it "on a usage basis, denominated in Copilot Credits".

The plan comparison on Microsoft's business pricing page carries the same split. All three columns mark Copilot Cowork "Usage-based", the two Microsoft 365 plans included. Cowork also ships switched off. An admin chooses who gets access, and tenants that used it during the preview were not billed until 1 July 2026. Whether that perimeter is the one you want is a separate question, answered on whether Copilot Cowork is open source.

A credit is a common currency, and four inputs set the price

Microsoft Learn calls Copilot Credits "a common currency for eligible Microsoft services with usage-based billing". Cowork is one of the services settled in them, beside advanced work in SharePoint and OneDrive, the Work IQ API, Copilot Managed Runtime and Copilot Code (the billing overview, checked October 2026).

A task's price is built from four inputs, again in Microsoft's words: "model use, context retrieval, tool calls, and runtime". Microsoft sorts the work it observed into three shapes. Light tasks touch few sources, reason briefly and return one output or none. Medium tasks draw on several sources, reason in steps and return two or more outputs. Heavy tasks read widely, reason deeply and return many outputs. A longer run, a bigger model and more retrieved context each move one of the four inputs.

The same request, asked in a heavier form next week, costs more. Microsoft prices the credit and models the task mix rather than quoting a price for a task, so its Copilot Credit Estimator in the Microsoft 365 admin center is how a team turns its own pattern of work into a figure. Two payment shapes sit over that price: pay-as-you-go at a cent a credit, or the Copilot Credit Pre-purchase Plan, P3, which commits to a volume in advance for a discount.

Two monthly bills, worked from Microsoft's published rates

Take 25 seats on the annual Copilot Business add-on at Microsoft's $21 list price, and a month in which each person hands over enough work to consume 2,000 credits. Seats: 25 × $21 = $525. Work: 50,000 credits × $0.01 = $500. The month lands at $1,025. The meter has added 95% to the seat line.

Now halve the delegated work, to 1,000 credits a person. The seats stay at $525. The work comes to 25,000 × $0.01 = $250, and the month totals $775, with the meter at 48%. Both totals are arithmetic on Microsoft's published rates. The credit figures stand in for the task mix the estimator is built to predict. What the arithmetic shows is the shape of the risk. The seat line is fixed and knowable. The credit line decides whether the month is affordable.

Kortix settles the same unit differently. Credits cost a cent each there too, and they buy machine time rather than task size: 1 credit is about five minutes of agent computer, 11 credits an hour, and $200 a month buys 20,000 credits, roughly 1,830 hours (Pricing, checked October 2026). One meter counts a task, the other counts a second. That difference in unit is the whole difficulty in setting them side by side, and the single-pair comparison takes up the rest. What a bill cannot settle is who holds the setup, and the Cowork page compares that for both products.

The same meter, a different owner

Both companies settle usage in credits worth one cent. What separates them is who holds the account where the work and its configuration live. That is a budgeting question as much as a legal one. It decides whether the line item survives a change of vendor.

A Kortix project is a git repository. Each agent's behavior, its skills, the shared memory and the connectors it may call are checked in as files. The install goes where the team wants it: "Run it on Kortix Cloud, in your VPC, or on your own on-prem network. Self-host is free." On the hosted side, Free is $0 with 500 credits per month, every feature and 1 project, on your own provider keys or a ChatGPT subscription. Managed models need the Credits plan or Enterprise. The paid plan is credits: tiers from $50 a month (5,000 credits) to $50,000 a month (5,000,000 credits), at 100 credits per dollar. Kortix is open source, so the code, the grants and the review path can be read before a purchase order exists, and the self-hosting guide covers the install.

Microsoft publishes its credit price and an estimator for the task mix. Kortix publishes a rate card in the same unit and a free install, so a team can price the same work before it commits.