What is the /cost command?

/cost is a command you type in a Cowork session to see how many Copilot Credits that session has spent so far. It's the only per-task cost figure Microsoft gives you in the moment - the admin centre reports by person and by month, not by job. For working out what your own tasks actually cost, it's the tool.

Every figure on this site is directional: ranges from Microsoft's tiers and published guides. /cost replaces them with your numbers. Run it at the end of your first ten real tasks and you'll have a personal tier map - this report costs 400, that research brief costs 1,800 - that's worth more than any published range, including ours.

It also teaches briefing. Run the same job twice, once with 'use everything' and once with named sources, and /cost shows the difference. Most teams find the tighter brief costs noticeably less and reads better. That's the cheapest optimisation in the whole product.

One caveat: it reports the session, not the task. If you've chatted back and forth, corrected it twice and asked for a reformat, all of that is in the number. Which is honest - that's what the job really cost.