Two questions, three buying routes costed in Australian dollars, with the commitment attached to each. Below the numbers: how to buy, how to allocate credits across your environments, and the guardrails that stop a trial becoming a surprise bill.
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Pay-as-you-go
Capacity packs
Pre-Purchase Plan
The steps for each route, with Microsoft's own documentation. The card matching your answers is highlighted, but all three are here.
Buying credits does not make them spendable. Each Power Platform environment where agents are built or run needs its own share: prepaid capacity is allocated per environment in the Power Platform admin centre, and pay-as-you-go reaches an environment only once it is linked to a billing policy. An environment with neither cannot consume credits - which is a control, not a fault, and the guardrails below use it deliberately. Allocate capacity on Microsoft Learn →
Pay-as-you-go is the right answer for a trial. It is also where the stories about agents quietly spending thousands of dollars come from: uncapped metering on a runtime most tenants have not governed yet. Agents built on the GitHub Copilot Harness consume credits regardless of who is licensed and which environment they sit in, and metering starts when a maker begins authoring, not when something is published. Natural-language authoring, previews, test runs and generated evaluations all draw down credits.
There is currently no switch to disable that runtime for an environment or a security group, and makers across the tenant can reach it by default. Until one ships, capacity allocation is the lever that does the job. The workable pattern is to close it down first, decide how you want it governed, then reopen it deliberately.
| Guardrail | What it does | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Stop tenant-pool spillover | Clear the option that lets an environment draw from tenant capacity once its own allocation is spent. Leave it on and every limit below is decorative. Allow a day or two for the change to reach environments, so do this one first. | Manage capacity |
| Allocate zero by default | Give every environment outside the trial an allocation of nothing. Development environments first, since that is where exploratory authoring happens. | Manage capacity |
| Reopen on purpose | Stand up one dedicated environment for the trial, with an allocation you chose rather than inherited. That is enough to start - grow the pattern only if the trial earns it. | Environment strategy |
| Cap each agent | In production, set a monthly credit limit per agent and per workflow with a hard stop, whether or not the harness has its own environment. | Quotas and limits |
| Alert on every limit | A limit nobody is told about is found after the fact. Turn on admin notifications for each one, and watch consumption reporting as it lands in your tenant. | Consumption reporting |
None of this is elegant. An environment-level or group-level toggle for the runtime would be the cleaner answer, and until there is one the licensing page is doing the work of a governance page.
Before you buy anything, talk to your cloud solution provider or your Microsoft account representative. Promotions, funded pilots and time-boxed incentives are common on Copilot and never appear on a public price list. If an Enterprise Agreement renewal is coming up, put credit volume and rate on the table then - that is where the leverage is.
A guide, not a quote. Prices are correct as at 11 August 2026 and change without notice; Australian figures move with the exchange rate Microsoft applies at the point of purchase, which is not the spot rate. All figures ex GST - Australian purchases attract 10% GST. This is not licensing, pricing, tax or financial advice: use it to frame the conversation, then confirm the numbers with your Microsoft account team or licensing provider before you commit. Full working in The three ways to buy Copilot Credits.
Pay-as-you-go bills at Microsoft's published rate of US$0.01 per credit. Capacity packs are priced from the Microsoft 365 admin centre at $299.30 per pack per month for 25,000 credits, before applicable taxes; Australian cents-per-credit figures for the other routes are derived at the exchange rate that price implies, about 1.50. The pack calculation picks the number of packs that costs least for your usage and meters anything above that at the pay-as-you-go rate, which is how Microsoft handles overage. Capacity pack credits do not roll over, so a month you underuse is money gone.
The Pre-Purchase Plan is shown as a range, not a figure, because Microsoft does not publish its tier ladder. The band runs from 5% at the bottom to 20% at the top, and the live rate card renders only inside the Azure portal purchase blade. One Copilot Credit Commit Unit pays down US$1 of retail usage, which is 100 credits. The entry tier being 3,000 units comes from secondary commentary rather than Microsoft, so treat the plan's lower bound as indicative.
Both discounted routes are twelve month commitments: capacity packs cancel with a prorated refund only within seven days under a Microsoft Customer Agreement, and Pre-Purchase Plan purchases are final - no cancelling, exchanging, splitting or merging. Only pay-as-you-go is commitment-free.
The Accelerator sizes agent workloads against a cost ceiling agreed before the build starts, so the licensing question is settled early rather than discovered late.