Why does Cowork bill through an Azure subscription?
Cowork's usage-based billing runs through an Azure subscription - Microsoft's pay-as-you-go cloud billing account - rather than through your Microsoft 365 licence invoice. The admin centre links the two. Your licences arrive on one bill, in pounds; your Cowork usage arrives on an Azure invoice, priced in US dollars. Two invoices, one product.
This catches finance teams out more than anything else about Cowork. The licence invoice looks like it always did. The usage appears somewhere new, priced in a different currency, often under the IT provider's name if they set it up. Tell your bookkeeper in advance.
If your business has never used Azure, setting up Cowork creates a subscription - which means a payment method, an owner, and a resource group with a name nobody chose. That's normal. Ask your IT provider to name it something recognisable and to make sure invoices come to finance, not to an engineer's inbox.
The currency point matters for budgeting: Copilot Credits are priced in dollars, so the pound cost of a fixed amount of usage moves with the exchange rate. This site converts at a deliberately cautious £1 = $1.27; a 5% move in the rate is a 5% move in the usage line.
Depending on how your Azure billing account is set up, the invoice may show pounds or dollars - but Copilot Credits are priced in US dollars either way, so the conversion happens somewhere. Budget for it.
No. A subscription with nothing in it costs nothing. Only the Cowork usage is charged.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether Cowork is the right spend is a different question.
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