What is pay-as-you-go Cowork pricing?
Pay-as-you-go is Microsoft's default pricing for Copilot Cowork: you pay $0.01 for every Copilot Credit your people spend, billed monthly in arrears, with no minimum and no commitment. It's the rate this calculator uses, and the right starting point for almost every smaller business - you find out what you actually use before you commit to anything.
Its virtue is that it can't be wrong. If nobody uses Cowork in a given month, the usage bill is zero. If usage doubles in January because self-assessment season doubled the heavy tasks, the bill doubles too - that's the deal, and it's also the point: cost tracks value delivered.
Its weakness is the flip side. Pay-as-you-go carries no discount, and it rewards attention: a tenant with open spending limits and a few enthusiastic users can run up a bill nobody planned. The fix is spending caps and a monthly look at who's spending what - not a different pricing plan.
When usage has settled and become predictable - say six months of steady spend - Microsoft's pre-purchase plan can shave 5% or more off. Until then, pay-as-you-go is the safer choice, because a pre-purchase you don't use expires.
No. You pay for credits used, and only those. A month with no Cowork use costs nothing on the usage line - the licences still apply.
Once you can predict a year's usage with confidence. The discount starts at 5% for 300,000 credits and rises with volume, but unused credits expire - so the saving only exists if you'd have spent it anyway.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether Cowork is the right spend is a different question.
We help established UK businesses get a clear view of what they're already running - before they add more on top.