Copilot Cowork will cost extra from July. Our calculator shows you the bill in advance.
On July 1, 2026, the rules of the game change. Microsoft will bill Copilot Cowork via credits, in addition to the license. Those who don't calculate now will pay blindly later. Our new calculator awaits you in the AIghty20 Member Hub. It will show you your budget down to the last franc.
What Changes on July 1st
Copilot Cowork is the agentic mode of Microsoft 365 Copilot: Instead of providing individual answers, it handles multi-step tasks end-to-end - planning, researching, invoking tools, delivering documents. The feature has been generally available since June 16, 2026.
The catch: What ran without consumption-based billing during the preview phase will be billed via Copilot Credits from July 1st - in addition to your existing Microsoft 365 Copilot license. The license grants your team access. You pay for the actual work of the agents separately, per task.
Why This Isn't a Trivial Calculation
A task doesn't cost a flat rate. Microsoft tiers pricing based on complexity in three levels - simple, medium, extensive - and consumption depends on which model is running, how much context is aggregated, how many tool calls are needed, and how long the runtime is.
The result: Two teams of the same size can generate vastly different bills. A department using Cowork for short summaries will incur a fraction of the cost compared to an engineering team using it for code generation, debugging, and architecture analysis. Consumption-based pricing remains unpredictable until you model it.
This is precisely where the budget risk lies - and this is exactly what the calculator addresses.
What the Calculator Does
The Cowork Budget Calculator estimates, based on real usage profiles, how many credits your organization consumes per month and what that means in CHF or EUR. The default values are derived from aggregated, anonymized consumption data from the Microsoft Frontier Program.
For each employee category - internal knowledge workers, knowledge workers with customer contact, technical staff, leadership - you enter the headcount and the expected prompts per month. The calculator provides you with:
- Monthly and Annual Budget, broken down with average costs per employee
- Scenario Comparison from conservative pilot to full rollout, three variants side-by-side
- 3-Year Projection with freely selectable user growth
- Export as PDF, Excel, or CSV - directly reusable for Procurement and Finance
An example that makes the point
A mid-sized company with 70 Cowork users - a mix of internal knowledge workers and technical staff - can quickly reach around CHF 11,000 to 12,000 per month in credits alone. In addition to licensing costs. Annually, this is a six-figure sum that is often overlooked during license planning because it doesn't appear on any license overview.
Anyone who only sees this figure on their first Microsoft bill will have a conversation with the CFO that could have been avoided.
How to use the calculator
The Cowork Budget Calculator is now available in the AIghty20 Member Hub - ready to use without login, with automatic browser storage and optional cloud storage for cross-device access.
Whether you're planning a rollout, need to approve a budget, or simply want to know what to expect from July onwards as a responsible party: calculate it once before Microsoft does it for you.
To the Cowork Budget Calculator in the Member Hub →
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